In this paper we present a full characterization of the growth process in a small open economy under political economy frictions and where politicians cannot commit to debt repayment or tax promises. We study how the dynamics are affected by the curvature of the utility function, the strength of...

We study optimal fiscal policy in a small open economy (SOE) with sovereign and private default risk. The SOE's government uses linear taxation to fund exogenous expenditures and uses public debt to inter-temporally allocate tax distortions. We characterize a class of environments in which the...

We construct a quantitative equilibrium model that accounts for the salient features of the US housing market, namely, the homeownership rate, the average foreclosure rate prior to the crisis and the distribution of home-equity ratios across homeowners. Given this steady state, we examine the...

We propose a theory of unsecured consumer credit where: (i) borrowers have the legal option to default; (ii) defaulters are not exogenously excluded from future borrowing; (iii) there is free entry of lenders; and (iv) lenders cannot collude to punish defaulters. In our framework, limited credit...

Marcet and Marimon (1994, revised 1998) developed a recursive saddle point method which can be used to solve dynamic contracting problems that include participation, enforcement and incentive constraints. Their method uses a recursive multiplier to capture implicit prior promises to the agent(s)...