I analyze how lack of commitment affects the maturity structure of sovereign debt. Ex post, the government trades off the gains from default induced redistribution against the cost of defaulting. Ex ante, the government issues debt of various maturities to raise an exogenous revenue requirement....

The purpose of this paper is to determine the normative and positive implications for fiscal policy in a weakly institutionalized economy which is not managed by a benevolent government, but is managed by a selfish dictator. We examine an economy with no capital, with fully state contingent...

In this paper we address the time-inconsistency of optimal debt policy—the incentive for a current government to “manipulate interest ratesâ€â€”raised in Lucas and Stokey’s celebrated 1983 paper. The literature that followed suggested various ways to fully overcome...

Governments in emerging markets often behave like a "tormented insurer", trying to use non-state-contingent debt instruments to avoid sharp adjustments in their payments to private agents despite sharp fluctuations in public revenues. In the data, their ability to sustain debt is inversely...

Market work per person is roughly 10 percent higher in the U.S. than in Sweden. However, if we include the work carried out in home production, the total amount of work differs by only 1%. I set up a model with home production and show that differences in policy - mainly taxes - can account for...

I construct a heterogeneous agents economy that mimics the time-series behavior of the US earnings distribution from 1963 to 2003. Agents face aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks and accumulate real and financial assets. I estimate the shocks driving the model using data on income inequality, on...

The paper sets out a monetary business cycle model extended to include the production of credit that serves as an alternative to money in transactions and is subject to productivity shocks. The model provides some improvement on certain puzzles, in particular by capturing the procyclic movements...

This paper introduces a form of boundedly-rational expectations into an otherwise standard New-Keynesian Phillips curve. The representative agent's forecast rule is optimal (in the sense of minimizing mean squared forecast errors), conditional on a perceived law of motion for inflation and...

We consider a monetary economy with directed multilateral matching between buyers and sellers. A buyer chooses how much money to hold, observes the location of all sellers, and decides which seller to visit. The number of buyers that arrive at a particular seller is random due to lack of...