In this paper we analyze the interaction of income and preference heterogeneity in a political economy framework. We ask whether the presence of preference heterogeneity (arising, for example, from different ethnic groups or geographic locations) affects the ability of the poor to extract...

This paper examines a process of debt renegotiation in which banks possess divergent interests and there is asymmetric information. The authors assume that large banks must exert pressure on small banks in order to obtain participation of these in the provision of new money and in debt...

This paper examines a two-sector small open economy that is subject to shocks in its terms-of-trade. Risk-neutral entrepreneurs use implicit contracts to insure risk-averse workers against fluctuations in their income. The characteristics of these contracts are examined within a general...

We present a simple model of sovereign debt crises in which a country chooses its optimal mix of short and long-term debt contracts subject to standard contracting frictions: the country cannot commit to repay its debts nor to a specific path of future debt issues, and contracts cannot be made...

This paper develops a quantitative life-cycle model to study the increase in married women's labor force participation (LFP). We calibrate the model to match key life-cycle statistics for the 1935 cohort and use it to assess the changed environment faced by the 1955 cohort. We find that a higher...

During the 1970s the US underwent an important change in its divorce laws, switching from mutual consent to a unilateral divorce regime. Who benefitted and who lost from this change? To answer this question we develop a dynamic life-cycle model in which agents make consumption, saving, labor...

We study the effect of culture on important economic outcomes by using the 1970 Census to examine the work and fertility behavior of women 30-40 years old, born in the U.S., but whose parents were born elsewhere. We use past female labor force participation and total fertility rates from the...

Despite the well-known gains from trade, trade liberalization is politically one of the most contentious actions that a government can take. We propose and formalize a new argument, having to do with uncertainty, which is complementary to the usual explanations for why that is the case; many...

This paper models the wage-contract negotiation procedure between a union and a firm as a sequential bargaining process in which the union also decides, in each period, whether or not to strike for the duration of that period. We show that there exist subgame-perfect equilibria in which the...