We analyze the relationship between international trade and the quality of economic institutions, such as contract enforcement, rule of law, and property rights. In our model, firms differ in their preferences for institutional quality, which is determined endogenously in a political economy...

This paper studies the impact of competition on the determination of interest rates and banks’ risk-taking behavior under different assumptions about deposit insurance and the dissemination of financial information. It finds that lower entry costs foster competition in deposit rate sand reduce...

Is it desirable that central banks be more transparent in the communication of sensible information when agents have diverse private information? In practice, there exists some consensus about the benefits of acting in this way. However, other studies warn that increasing the precision of public...

The paper provides estimates of the long-run, tax-adjusted, user cost elasticity of capital (UCE) in a small open economy, exploiting three sources of variation in Canadian tax policy: across provinces, industries, and years. Estimates of the UCE with Canadian data are less prone to the...

The paper shows how-in a Merton-type model with bankruptcy-the currency composition of debt changes the risk profile of a company raising a given amount of financing, and thus affects the cost of debt. Foreign currency borrowing is cheaper when the exchange rate is positively correlated with the...

This paper uses a stochastic continuous time model of the firm to study how different corporate governance structures affect the agency cost of debt. In the absence of asymmetric information, it shows that control of the firm by debtholders with a minority stake delays the exit decision and...

Evans (1991) has demonstrated that Blanchard’s (1985) finite-horizon model obeys approximate Ricardian equivalence. We show that this result is determined largely by an unrealistic assumption that labor income grows monotonically over a consumer’s entire lifetime. Introducing more realistic...

This paper examines the macroeconomic implications of life-cycle and dynastic saving behavior for closed and small, open economies. Using an extended version of Blanchard’s overlapping agents model, the analytical framework nests these two competing views, treating agents as either dynastic...

This paper develops a model to examine the macroeconomic implications of population aging. Using a general equilibrium framework, the analysis examines the various channels through which changes in demographics affect the economy. Age-earnings profiles are taken to summarize differences in...

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects and sequencing of (LMRs) and product (PMRs) market reforms in Morocco. It finds that introducing LMRs and PMRs simultaneously would add about 2.5 percentage points (pp) of GDP growth and reduce unemployment by about 2.2 pp after five years. If...