I show how the mechanisms of debt relief, redistribution and the uncertainty related to them could boil down to a discount rate shock for an aggregate representative agent. The mechanism hails from Ramsey's conjecture and the relationship between debt relief and the probability of repayment. To...

Economic convergence is an important topic in modern Macroeconomics. Economic convergence refers to the tendency of per capita income of countries (regions) to approach their steady-state value. Two types of convergence are identified in the literature: Conditional and Absolute Convergence. This...

The theoretical literature has predicted that inequality affects long-run growth by reducing human and physical capital, particularly in the presence of imperfect credit markets and other contractual frictions. We test these four mechanisms using measures of inequality at the country-level,...