Stock market bubbles arise as a joint monetary and financial phenomenon. We assess the potential of monetary policy in mitigating the onset of bubbles by means of a Markov-switching Bayesian Vector Autoregression model estimated on US 1960–2019 data. Bubbles are detected and dated from the regime-specific interplay among asset prices, fundamental values, and monetary policy shocks. We rationalize the empirical evidence with an Overlapping Generations model, able to generate a bubbly scenario with shifts in monetary policy, and where agents form beliefs over transition dynamics. By matching the VAR impulse responses, we find that procyclicality and financial instability align with high equity premia and the presence of asset price bubbles. Monetary policy tightening, by increasing real rates, is ineffective in deflating bubble episodes.

Individuals often deem market transactions in sex, human organs and surrogacy, among others, repugnant. Repugnance norms can be explained by appealing to social-status concerns. We study an exchange economy in which agents abhor consumption dominance: one’s social status is compromised if one consumes less of every good than someone else does. Dominance may be forestalled by partitioning goods into submarkets and then invoking the repugnance norms that proscribe trade across these submarkets. Dominance may also be forestalled if individuals strategically ‘overconsume’ some goods, interpreted as emergent status goods. When equilibria are multiple, there is scope for welfare-enhancing policies that coordinate on status goods.

Bilateral oligopoly is a simple model of exchange in which a finite set of sellers seek to exchange the goods they are endowed with for money with a finite set of buyers, and no price-taking assumptions are imposed. If trade takes place via a strategic market game bilateral oligopoly can be thought of as two linked proportional-sharing contests: in one the sellers share the aggregate bid from the buyers in proportion to their supply and in the other the buyers share the aggregate supply in proportion to their bids. The analysis can be separated into two “partial games”. First, fix the aggregate bid at B; in the first partial game the sellers contest this fixed prize in proportion to their supply and the aggregate supply in the equilibrium of this game is (B). Next, fix the aggregate supply at X; in the second partial game the buyers contest this fixed prize in proportion to their bids and the aggregate bid in the equilibrium of this game is (X). The analysis of these two partial games takes into account competition within each side of the market. Equilibrium in bilateral oligopoly must take into account competition between sellers and buyers and requires, for example, ((B)) = B. When all traders have Cobb-Douglas preferences (B) does not depend on B and (X) does not depend on X: whilst there is competition within each side of the market there is no strategic interdependence between the sides of the market. The Cobb-Douglas assumption provides a tractable framework in which to explore the features of fully strategic trade but it misses perhaps the most interesting feature of bilateral oligopoly, the implications of which are investigated.

We analyse the consequences of a change of the characteristics of goods due to new information on the equilibrium of a pure exchange economy with n goods and m agents. Some changes of the characteristics of goods à la Lancaster have a positive effect on utility. In the general competitive equilibrium, some agents gain but others may lose. Nevertheless there is an increase of a linear combination of the utilities of the agents. The different possibilities of gains and losses are explicitly analysed in an example with two goods and two agents.