In order to understand inefficient institutions, one needs to understand what mightcause the breakdown of a political version of the Coase Theorem. This paper considersan environment populated by ex-ante identical agents and develops a model of powerand distribution where institutions (the...

We empirically analyse the appropriateness of indexing emerging market sovereign debt to USreal interest rates. We find that policy-induced exogenous increases in US rates raise default riskin emerging market economies, as hypothesised in the theoretical literature. However, we also findevidence...

This paper analyses predictions of a simple model of currency crises in which the peg will beabandoned when the currency overvaluation hits a certain threshold, unknown to the agents. Due tolearning about the threshold, some features usually observed in the data and identified with modelswith...

In a country with high probability of default, higher interest rates may render the currency lessattractive if sovereign default is costly. This paper develops that intuition in a simple model andestimates the effect of changes in interest rates on the exchange rate in Brazil using data from...

This paper shows how a simple modi…fication of estimators based on the RandomEffects principle can preserve the consistency and asymptotic efficiency of the methodin panel data despite non-ignorable persistent heterogeneity driven by correlationsbetween the heterogeneity and the regressors. The...

The paper analyzes the existence and impact of …financing constraints as a possiblyserious obstacle to innovation by …firms. Direct measures of fi…nancing constraints areemployed using survey data collected by the Banque de France and Eurostat, whichovercomes the problems with the traditional...

The paper discusses the major identi…fication issue of coherency conditions in LDVmodels with endogeneity and flexible temporal and contemporaneous correlations inthe unobservables. Conditions for coherency as discussed in the existing literatureare reviewed and shown to be rather esoteric. Two...

This paper studies the distribution of the classical t-ratio with datagenerated from distributions with no finite moments and shows how classical testing isaspected by bimodality. A key condition in generating bimodality is independence of theobservations in the underlying data generating...

This paper studies the distribution of the classical t-ratio with data generatedfrom distributions with no nite moments and shows how classical testing is affectedby bimodality. A key condition in generating bimodality is independenceof the observations in the underlying data generating process...

This paper focuses on qualitative aspects of financing, investment and output decisions offirms. Such dimensions can be modeled econometrically by means of dynamic limited dependent variables models. We develop a partial equilibrium dynamic stochastic programmingproblem of investment, dividend...