This paper analyzes the optimal use of fiscal policy and sovereign debt repayment as signals in an asymmetric information environment. It shows that the presence of government private information could turn an optimal full-information countercyclical fiscal policy into a pro-cyclical one that...

Current account crises in emerging markets are characterized by large increases in interest rates, big drops in output, and large real currency depreciations. Current models of crisis with financial frictions do not generate very large movements in these variables. Recent work has shown that the...

We develop a stochastic, general equilibrium, two-country model of trade and macroeconomic dynamics. Productivity differs across individual, monopolistically competitive firms in each country. Firms face some initial uncertainty concerning their future productivity when making an irreversible...

A central feature of international business cycles is that fluctuations of real and nominal exchange rates are volatile and persistent. Recent two-country dynamic general equilibrium models have explored the implications for real exchange rate fluctuations from monetary shocks in the presence of...

In spite of the concerns about “twin deficits†(fiscal and current account deficits) for the U.S., empirical evidence suggests that “twin divergence†is a more regular feature of the data: when the fiscal accounts worsen, the current account improves and vice versa. We thus...

Open economy macroeconomics typically takes as exogenously given important aspects of the pattern of international trade. This paper shows how heterogeneity in trade costs and heterogeneity in productivities work together to jointly determine features of the pattern of international trade and...

This paper combines default, settlement, and repayment history into a unified, dynamic borrowing model of sovereign debt. The model addresses two questions: 1) how the level of debt and the income profile affect the length of time a country in default is excluded from the international credit...

This paper evaluates whether an estimated, structural, small open economy model of the Canadian economy can account for the substantial influence of foreign-sourced disturbances identified in numerous reduced-form studies. The analysis shows that the benchmark model --- and a number of variants...