We develop a model of investment with financial constraints and use it to investigate the relation between investment and Tobin’s q. A firm is financed partly by insiders, who control its assets, and partly by outside investors. When insiders’ wealth is scarce, they earn a rate of...

Many individuals simultaneously have significant credit card debt and money in the bank. The so-called credit card debt puzzle is, given high interest rates on credit cards and low interest rates on bank accounts, why not pay down this debt? Economists have gone to some lengths to explain this....

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....

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 builds a dynamic model of borrowing and default to study the term structure of sovereign bonds in emerging markets. The borrower in the model can buy short and long bonds at contingent prices that reflect the timing of default events. The model generates a yield curve that is upward...

This paper solves the pricing problem of an merging market debt contract in which the borrower’s economy is subject to rare event risk. Our model combines elements of a reduced form and a structural model of debt pricing. Rare event risk is modeled as a sudden event in fundamentals, and...

I study the constrained efficient allocations of a simple model of risk sharing and capital flows across countries assuming that each country cannot commit to fully repay its contract obligations. In the model, the degree of risk sharing and the amount of investment are interdependent. It is...

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...