This introduces the symposium on monetary and macro economics.

This paper examines the properties of efficient sustainable allocations in an environment in which two agents want to share risk, have perfect information about each other, but cannot make commitments about future transfers. I describe as sustainable any allocation that can be supported as a...

In a wide range of economic settings, equilibrium outcomes in pure credit equilibria are known to be Pareto optimal (or Pareto optimal given informational or enforcement limitations). In a series of examples, I demonstrate how the above equivalence result can be used to provide a more complete...

Internal and sovereign debt crises occur together and happen more frequently in economies with weak bankruptcy institutions. This paper provides a novel explanation. Internal crises arise because of the inability to liquidate private debtors when many default. In an optimal contract, a...