This paper develops a simple model of sovereign debt in which defaulting nations are excluded from capital markets and regain access by making partial repayments. This implication of the model is consistent with the historical evidence that defaulting countries return to international loan...

This paper develops a differentiated product model with endogenous specialization in which either money or a costly alternative transactions technology can be used for market purchases. The authors discuss the real effects of monetary growth in this model--which differ from those in standard...

The authors argue that many goods and decisions are not allocated or made through markets. They interpret an agent's status as a ranking device that determines how well he or she fares in the nonmarket sector. The existence of a nonmarket sector can endogenously generate a concern for relative...

The authors contrast properties of real quantities with those of price levels and stocks of money for ten countries over the last century. Although the magnitude of output fluctuations has varied across countries and periods, relations among real quantities have been remarkably uniform....

This paper develops the quantitative implications of optimal fiscal policy in a business cycle model. In a stationary equilibrium, the ex ante tax rate on capital income is approximately zero. The tax rate on labor income fluctuates very little and inherits the persistence properties of the...

The authors examine the limiting behavior of cooperative and noncooperative fiscal policies as countries' market power goes to zero. They show that these policies converge if countries raise revenues through lump-sum taxation. However, if there are unremovable domestic distortions, such as...

The authors ask whether a two-country business cycle model can account simultaneously for domestic and international aspects of business cycles. With this question in mind, the authors document a number of discrepancies between theory and data. The most striking discrepancy concerns the...