We review the literature on sovereign debt. We organize our survey around three central questions: (1) Why do sovereign debtors ever repay their debts? (2) What burdens, in the form of distortions and inefficiencies, does sovereign debt impose? and (3) How might debt be restructured to reduce...

Despite the well-known gains from trade, trade liberalization is politically one of the most contentious actions that a government can take. We propose and formalize a new argument, having to do with uncertainty, which is complementary to the usual explanations for why that is the case; many...

Why do governments so often fail to adopt policies that economists consider to be efficiency-enhancing? The authors answer to this question relies on uncertainty regarding the distribution of gains and losses from reform. They show that there is a bias toward the status quo (and, hence, against...

Tax amnesties are frequently offered by governments to induce citizens to voluntarily declare black assets accumulated from past tax evasion, especially in developing countries with a large ,underground' economy. The resulting switch in a citizen asset portfolios in favor of white assets could...

We study the problem of loan enforcement in an informal credit market where credit histories of borrowers are not available to lenders, raising the possibility of serial default. We show that if there is critical minimum proportion of natural defaulters in the populatin, then there exists an...

We discuss the use of multiple exchange rates to ration foreign exchange in developing countries, focusing on the case where there is an officially set exchange rate and a second parallel rate that is freely determined by the market. We assume the Central Bank determines the proportions of...

The relative distribution of the populations of the top 40 urban areas of France and Japan remained very constant during these countries' periods of industrialization and uranization. Moreover, projection of their future distriubtions based on past growth indicates that their size-distributions...

This paper uses the Auerbach-Kotlikoff Dynamic Life-Cycle Model (AK Model) to examine the macroeconomic and efficiency effects of privatizing social security. It also uses a simple privatization proposal, the Personal Security System, as a framework to discuss a number of other issues associated...