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...

This paper analyzes the strategic role of investment from a debtor country's perspective. The framework is one in which, if the debtor country is unable to meet debt obligations, a bargaining regime determines the amount of debt repayment. In the context of a two-country real trade model, debt...

We study the question of whether there exist strategies whereby countries are able to sustain a cartel or collusive behavior when bargaining with a bank over the amount of debt to be repaid. We show that despite the existence of economies to scale in bargaining--if commitment were possible the...

This paper examines the effect that the coexistence of small and large banks, with different interests in the international market, has on the debt renegotiation process. Making use of a reputational model, we argue that the presence of small banks implies that debtor countries have a harder...

We present a model of a financial market where some traders are "cursed" when choosing how much to invest in a risky asset, failing to fully take into account what prices convey about others' private information. Cursed traders put more weight on their private signals than rational traders. But...

We study strategic disclosure timing by correlated firms in the presence of risk-averse investors. Firms delay disclosures in the hope that positively correlated firms will announce especially good news and lift their own price. Risk premia rise before disclosures, drop when disclosures occur,...

We present an alternative expectation formation mechanism that helps rationalize well known asset pricing anomalies, such as the predictability of excess returns, excess volatility, and the equity-premium puzzle. As with rational expectations (RE), the expectation formation mechanism we consider...

This paper is an investigation into the determinants of asymmetries in stock returns. We develop a series of cross-sectional regression specifications which attempt to forecast skewness in the daily returns of individual stocks. Negative skewness is most pronounced in stocks that have...

The most cost-effective policies for achieving CO2 abatement (e.g., carbon taxes) fail to get off the ground politically because of unacceptable distributional consequences. This paper explores CO2 abatement policies designed to address distributional concerns. Using an intertemporal numerical...