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...

We revisit the issue of the usefulness of Social Security when there are frictions that prevent the existence of a fluid market for annuities. We model households as families and not as individual agents which provides a rationale for the existence of life insurance. Moreover, our structure also...

We propose a theory of unsecured debt that is based on the existence of private information about a person's type and on the fact that some debtors have the incentive to forego bankruptcy in order to signal their type. The theory formalizes the idea that the type of a person is relevant to...

This paper studies the consequences of capital markets liberalization for global imbalances (non-zero foreign asset positions) when countries are heterogeneous in the degree of financial market development. Countries characterized by more advanced financial markets tend to accumulate large...

We explore a political-economy model of labor subsidies, extending Meltzer and Richard's median-voter model to a dynamic setting. We explore only one source of heterogeneity: initial wealth. As a consequence, given an operative wealth effect, poorer agents work harder, and if the agent with...

In this paper we document that "frictional wage inequality" (i.e. due to pure luck in the matching process in the labor market) is large and that both the standard McCall search model and the simplest Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides matching model, reasonably calibrated, are strikingly unable to...