Asset Prices and Business Cycles Under Market Incompleteness

Abstract

This paper studies the quantitative implications of a real business cycle model where the firm is the capital owner, households are heterogeneous, and markets are incomplete due to restricted asset trade. Since the usual firm objective is no longer well defined under these assumptions, several non standard objectives are incorporated into the model. These include variants of market value maximization and a utility function for the firm. We find that the presence of market incompleteness hardly alters the behavior of asset returns. On the other hand, the behavior of the macroeconomic aggregates is sensitive to the firm objective, which affects the capital accumulation path. In contrast to conventional findings, capital is not necessarily higher when markets are incomplete. In addition, the different capital accumulation effects imply that shareholders with different asset wealth might prefer different firm objectives.

JEL Classification: E13, E44, G12