Most economic activity occurs in cities. This creates a tension between local increasing returns, implied by the existence of cities, and aggregate constant returns, implied by balanced growth. To address this tension, we develop a theory of economic growth in an urban environment. We show how...

This paper builds a simple theoretical model designed to study dollarization. Each period, a benevolent government decides whether or not to dollarize, how much to borrow or lend on an international bond market, and, if dollarization has not occurred, the devaluation rate. In equilibrium,...

Is increased competition in international financial markets desirable? On the one hand, reductions in mnopoly power can be efficiency improving. On the other, increased competition may make it hard to coordinate in disciplining debtors in default. This paper presents a model that formalizes this...

In this paper, we put forward a theory of the optimal capital structure of the firm based on Jensen's (1986) hypothesis that a firm's choice of capital structure is determined by a trade-off between agency costs and monitoring costs. The problem of determining the optimal capital structure of...