This paper presents a stylized model of international trade and asset price bubbles. Its central insight is that bubbles tend to appear and expand in countries where productivity is low relative to the rest of the world. These bubbles absorb local savings, eliminating inefficient investments and...

The paper provides a reconciliation of Lucas' paradox, based on fixed setup costs of new investments. With such costs, it does not pay a firm to make a "small" investment, even though such an investment is called for by marginal productivity conditions. Using a sample of 45 developed and...

In this paper, I argue that demographic factors play a central role in accounting for the trade deficit experienced by the U.S. during the last three decades. The main idea is that cross-country demographic differentials lead to adjustments in savings and investments which are associated with...

We argue that emerging economies borrow short term due to the high risk premium charged by bondholders on long-term debt. First, we present a model where the debt maturity structure is the outcome of a risk sharing problem between the government and bondholders. By issuing long-term debt, the...

This paper examines the importance of productivity shocks in accounting for salient features of U.S. economic developments during the second half of the 1990s, including the surge in investment spending, the substantial deterioration of the trade balance, and the modest decline in inflation. We...

A narrowing of the U.S. current account deficit through exchange rate movements is likely to entail a substantial depreciation of the dollar, as stressed in research by Obstfeld and Rogoff. We assess how the adjustment is affected by the high degree of financial integration in the world economy....

We develop a dynamic model of sovereign default and renegotiation to study how expectations of default and debt restructuring in the near future affect the ex ante maturity structure of sovereign debts. This paper argues that the average maturity is shorter when a country is approaching...