In the financial accelerator literature pioneered by Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999) entrepreneurs are myopic and lenders suboptimally choose a safe rate of return on their loans. We derive the optimal lending contract for forward looking entrepreneurs and provide three main results....

We study cooperative and non-cooperative fiscal policy in an open economy model where cross-country risk sharing is imperfect and countries face terms of trade externalities. We show that the optimal form of fiscal cooperation, or fiscal union, is defined by one parameter: the Armington...