We address the question of whether and how a sovereign should reduce its external indebtedness when default is a significant possibility, with a particular focus on whether a sovereign should buy back or dilute existing long-term sovereign bonds. Our main finding is that when reduction of debt...

In many markets, sellers advertise their good with an asking price. This is a price at which the seller will take his good off the market and trade immediately, though it is understood that a buyer can submit an offer below the asking price and that this offer may be accepted if the seller...

Prepayment risk is a major consideration in the US credit card market. According to industry studies, about 17% of balances are transferred annually. Using a dynamic model of repricing, this paper analyzes the impact of prepayment risk on the functioning of the credit card market. We show that...

In this paper, we examine the the determinents of the evolution of male hours by years of schooling within the U.S. between the mid-1960s through the late 2000s. We quantify the extent to which changes in wages, changes in female labor supply, changes in the taxes and transfers, changes in the...

This paper investigates how political incentives affect the allocation of public goods using data from Brazil's Federal Legislature, a setting in which federal politicians representing multi-member districts can issue budgetary amendments for public works in their respective districts. We...

Using micro-data from 48 developing countries, this paper studies changes in cross-sectional patterns of fertility and child investment over the course of the demographic transition. Before 1960, children from larger families obtained more education, in large part because they had richer and...

We develop a theoretical framework to quantitatively assess the general equilibrium effects and welfare implications of central bank reputation and transparency. Monetary policy alternates between periods of active inflation stabilization and periods during which the emphasis on inflation...

Though risk aversion and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution have been the subjects of careful scrutiny when calibrating preferences, the long-run risks literature as well as the broader literature using recursive utility to address asset pricing puzzles have ignored the full...

We construct a continuous-time model of incomplete markets where households value both deterministic consumption flows and infrequent and random opportunities of lumpy consumption. Because of lack of commitment and lack of record keeping, households cannot borrow to finance these random...

Legal institutions affect economic outcomes, but how much? This paper documents how costly supplier contract enforcement shapes firm boundaries, and quantifies the impact of this transaction cost on aggregate productivity and welfare. I embed a contracting game between a buyer and a supplier in...