We provide a model with endogenous portfolios of secured and unsecured household debt. Secured debt is collateralized by owner-occupied housing whereas unsecured debt can be discharged according to bankruptcy regulations. We show that the calibrated model matches important quantitative...

When facing financial distress, French households can file a case to a "households' over-indebtedness commission" (HDC). The HDC can order an immediate repayment or grant a debt suspension. Exploiting the random assignment of bankruptcy filings to managers, we show that a debt suspension has a...

We focus on the role that the transmission of information between a multilateral (the IMF) and a country has for the optimal design of conditional reforms. Our model predicts that when agency problems are especially severe, and/or IMF information is valuable, a centralized control is indeed...

The internet has become an important data source for the Social Sciences because these data are available without lags, can be regarded as involuntary surveys and hence have no observer effect, can be geo-labeled, are available for countries across the globe and can be viewed in continuous time...

This paper analyzes the strikingly different response of unemployment to the Great Recession in France and Spain. Their labor market institutions are similar and their unemployment rates just before the crisis were both around 8%. Yet, in France, unemployment rate has increased by 2 percentage...

The paper takes a comparative perspective on the labour market impact on G20 and EU countries of the financial and economic crisis that began in 2008. It starts from the observation that the decline in employment and rise in unemployment in relation to output or GDP reductions varies...

Argentina hit headlines around the world in 2002 on account of the largest debt default in history and a sudden economic collapse that generated statistics reminiscent of those from the Great Depression. In this article we focus on other consequences of the crisis that are not so obvious but...

Macro-level changes can have substantial effects on the distribution of resources at the household level. While it is possible to speculate about which groups are likely to be hardest-hit, detailed distributional studies are still largely backward-looking. This paper suggests a straightforward...

In the mid 2000s Ireland experienced a large inflow of immigrants, partly in response to strong economic growth but also in response to its decision to allow full access to its labour market when EU expansion occurred in May 2004. Between 2004 and 2007, the proportion of non-nationals living in...