We show that the key identifying assumptions underlying the existing approaches to identifying technology shocks in the data are violated in models with heterogeneous capital and labor. We propose a new method to identifying technology shocks in the data in presence of factor heterogeneity and...

Bulow and Rogoff (1989) show that a country that has access to a sufficiently rich asset market cannot commit to repay its debts and therefore should be unable to borrow. This is because for any debt contract, there exists a time at which the country is made better off by defaulting and...

This paper studies the optimal trade-off between commitment and flexibility in an intertemporal consumption/savings choice model. Individuals expect to receive relevant information regarding their own situation and tastes - generating a value for flexibility - but also expect to suffer from...

We study optimal fiscal policy in a small open economy (SOE) with sovereign and private default risk. The SOE's government uses linear taxation to fund exogenous expenditures and uses public debt to inter-temporally allocate tax distortions. We characterize a class of environments in which the...

In this paper we present a full characterization of the growth process in a small open economy under political economy frictions and where politicians cannot commit to debt repayment or tax promises. We study how the dynamics are affected by the curvature of the utility function, the strength of...

This paper studies overborrowing, financial crises and macro-prudential policy in an equilibrium model of business cycles and asset prices with collateral constraints. Agents in a decentralized competitive equilibrium do not internalize the negative effects of asset fire-sales on the value of...