This paper is an analysis of the simultaneous determination of financial default and political crises and its consequences. It focuses on a small open economy that faces a debt default decision. Crucially, this decision is made by a government that has superior information than the public about...

This paper studies theoretically and empirically the role of domestic political incentives in the accumulation of large external debts by developing countries during 1972-81. The theoretical model characterizes two equilibrium regimes. In one regime the borrower is on its demand curve and...

In this paper we analyze empirically the most important implications of two family political economy models of inflation: the "myopic? government approach and the "weak" government approach. In myopic government models inflation is the deliberate outcome of politicians strategic behavior, while...

The importance of seignorage relative to other sources of government revenue differs markedly across countries. The main theoretical implication of this paper is that countries with more unstable and polarized political systems rely more heavily on seignorage. This result is obtained within the...

Benchmark finance and macroeconomic models appear to deliver conflicting estimates of the natural rate and bond risk premia. This natural rate puzzle applies not only in the U.S. but across many advanced economies. We use a unified no-arbitrage macro- finance model with two trend factors to...

Sovereign borrowing during inflation surges is a litmus test of a government's ability to withstand and navigate macroeconomic shocks. Based on transaction-level bond issuance data, we explore how sovereign financing strategies respond to inflation surges and how policy practices affect their...

Recent theories of exchange rate determination have emphasized limited UIP arbitrage by international financial institutions. New regulations since 2008 have also lead to imperfect CIP arbitrage. We show that under limited CIP arbitrage the exchange rate and CIP deviation are jointly determined...

Exchange-rate models fit very well for the U.S. dollar in the 21st century. A "standard" model that includes real interest rates and a measure of expected inflation for the U.S. and the foreign country, the U.S. comprehensive trade balance, and measures of global risk and liquidity demand is...

Research has shown that the unilateral accumulation of international reserves by a country can improve its own macro-financial stability. However, we show that when many countries accumulate reserves, the induced general equilibrium effects weaken financial and macroeconomic stability,...