Market participants' risk attitudes, wealth and portfolio composition in°uence their positions in a pegged foreign currency and, therefore, may have important e®ects on the sustainability of currency pegs. We analyze such e®ects in a global game model of currency crises with continuous action...

This paper studies a dynamic model of crises with timing frictions that combines the main aspects of Morris and Shin (1998) and Frankel and Pauzner (2000). The usual arguments for existence and uniqueness of equilibrium cannot be applied. It is shown that the model has a unique equilibrium...

This paper analyses whether sovereign default episodes can be seen as contingencies of optimal international lending contracts. The model considers a small open economy with capital accumulation and without commitment to repay debt. Taking first order approximations of Bellman equations, I...

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

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

A striking fact about prices is the prevalence of ``sales'': large temporary price cuts followed by a return exactly to the former price. This paper builds a macroeconomic model with a rationale for sales based on firms facing consumers with different price sensitivities. Even if firms can vary...

Institutions that serve the interests of an elite are often cited as an important reason for poor economic performance. This paper builds a model of institutions that allocate resources and power to maximize the payoff of an elite, but where any group that exerts sufficient fighting effort can...

Creditors of a distressed borrower face a coordination problem. Even if the fundamentals are sound, fear of premature foreclosure by others may lead to pre-emptive actions, undermining the project. Recognition of this problem lies behind corporate bankruptcy provisions across the world, and it...

Do large investors increase the vulnerability of a country to speculative attacks in the foreign exchange markets? To address this issue, we build a model of currency crises where a single large investor and a continuum of small investors independently decide whether to attack a currency based...

This paper examines the extent to which mothers that care for children where the father is non-resident have an award or agreement for child support in place. Data from the Families and Children Study are used to explore not only whether mothers have an award or order but the type of award they...