This dissertation consists of four self-contained papers that deal with the implications of financial market imperfections and heterogeneity. The analysis mainly relates to the class of incomplete-markets models but covers different research topics. The first paper deals with the distributional effects of financial integration for developing countries. Based on a simple heterogeneous-agent approach, it is shown that capital owners experience large welfare losses while only workers moderately

more »

... n due to higher wages. The large welfare losses for capital owners contrast with the small average welfare gains from representative-agent economies and indicate that a strong opposition against capital market opening has to be expected. The second paper considers the puzzling observation of capital flows from poor to rich countries and the accompanying changes in domestic economic development. Motivated by the mixed results from the literature, we employ an incomplete-markets model with different types of idiosyncratic risk and borrowing constraints. Based on different scenarios, we analyze under what conditions the presence of financial market imperfections contributes to explain the empirical findings and how the conditions may change with different model assumptions. The third paper deals with the interplay of incomplete information and financial market imperfections in an incomplete-markets economy. In particular, it analyzes the impact of incomplete information about idiosyncratic income shocks on aggregate saving. The results show that the effect of incomplete information is not only quantitatively substantial but also qualitatively ambiguous and varies with the influence of the income risk and the borrowing constraint. Finally, the fourth paper analyzes the influence of different types of fiscal rules on the response of key macroeconomic variables to a government spending shock. We find that a strong temporary increase in public debt contributes to stabilizing consumption and leisure in the first perio [...]