Two of the main puzzles in international economics are the consumption and the portfolio home biases. They are empirically related: countries that are more open to trade also have more internationally diversifed portfolios. In a two-country stochastic equilibrium model, I prove that introducing...

This paper models the executive's choice of whether to reschedule external debt as the outcome of an intra-governmental negotiation process. The executive's necessity of a confidence vote from the legislature is found to provide the rationale for why some democracies may not renegotiate their...

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...

There is pervasive evidence that individuals invest primarily in domestic assets and thus hold poorly diversified portfolios. Empirical studies suggest that informational asymmetries may play a role in explaining the bias towards domestic assets. In contrast, theoretical studies based on...

This paper explains financial contagion between two independent stock markets by fluctuations in international investors' attention allocation. I model the process of attention allocation that underlies portfolio investment in international markets using rationally inattentive agents. Investors...