The paper analyzes the role of differences in household behavior as a source of persistent and even permanent differences between national or regional productivity growth rates, when there are constant static returns to scale in production and costless international diffusion of technology. A...

The paper develops a two-country endogenous growth model to investigate possible causes for the existence and persistence of productivity growth differentials between nations despite a common technology, constant returns to scale and perfect international capital mobility. Private consumption is...

We investigate how the ability of the government to depart from budget balance and issue debt expands the set of equilibria that can be supported using lump-sum tax-transfer instruments. We show how this depends on the restrictions that exist on the capacity to tax and make transfer payments,...

In a competitive two-country overlapping generations model with perfect capital mobility, a plan that is individually Pareto optimal (that is Pareto optimal with respect to individual preferences) can be sustained without coordination of national fiscal policies when the fiscal arsenal is...

international transmission of fiscal policy among open interdependent economies under free international capital mobility. With only lump-sum taxes and transfers, international transmission involves only pecuniary externalities: barring dynamic inefficiency, only distributional issues...

This paper considers the effects of fiscal and financial policy on economic growth in open and closed economies, when human capital formation by young households is constrained by the illiquidity of human wealth. Both endogenous and exogenous growth versions of the basic OLG model are analyzed....

Because trade liberalization which is anticipated to be temporary creates a divergence between the effective domestic rate of interest and the world rate of interest, tariff-reduction in the presence of international financial asset trade may reduce welfare for a small country. Calvo has argued...

The IMF attempts to stabilize private capital flows to emerging markets by providing public monitoring and emergency finance. In analyzing its role we contrast cases where banks and bondholders do the lending. Banks have a natural advantage in monitoring and creditor coordination, while bonds...

At the April 2003 meeting of the International Monetary and Financial Committees, it was decided to further encourage the contractual approach to smoothing the process of sovereign debt restructuring by encouraging the more widespread use of collective action clauses (CACs) in international...

A model of the domestic financial intermediation of foreign capital inflows based on agency costs is developed for studying financial crises in emerging markets. In equilibrium for the model economy, the banking system becomes progressively more fragile under imperfect prudential regulation and...