This paper studies informal default in consumer credit as the start of a process of negotiation with the lender. We consider an economy with uninsurable individual risk where households in debt have also the option of declaring formal bankruptcy. In a calibrated version of the model, informal...

From the end of the SecondWorldWar to the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, per-capita GDP in the economies of East Asia grew almost three times as fast as in the economies of Latin America. Specifically, in 1950, the economies of the Asian Tigers (Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan)...

We develop a macroeconomic model with physical and human capital, human capital risk, and limited contract enforcement. We show analytically that young (high-return) households are the most exposed to human capital risk and are also the least insured. We document this risk-insurance pattern in...

Data on the stock of sovereign debt are typically presented at "face value", defined as the undiscounted sum of future principal repayments. This measure has some obvious problems. As it includes only principal repayments, it can give a misleading depiction of relative indebtedness levels, and...