This paper studies the repayment of regional debt in a multi-region economy with a central authority: who pays the obligation issued by a region? With commitment, a central government will use its taxation power to smooth distortionary taxes across regions. Absent commitment, the central...

This paper studies the provision of deposit insurance without commitment in an economy with heterogenous households. When households are identical, deposit insurance will be provided ex post to reap insurance gains. But the ex post provision of deposit insurance redistributes consumption when...

This paper studies the implications of the circulation of interest bearing regional debt in a monetary union. Does the circulation of this debt have the same monetary implications as the printing of money by a central government? Or are the obligations of this debt simply backed by future...

This paper studies fiscal spillovers in a monetary union. The focus of the analysis is on the interaction between the fiscal policy of member countries (regions) and the central monetary authority. When capital markets are integrated, the fiscal policy of one country will influence equilibrium...

This paper assess the affects of the orderly liquidation of a failing bank and the ex post provision of deposit insurance on the prospect of bank runs. Assuming that the public institutions in charge of these policies lack commitment power, these interventions, both individually and jointly, are...

While the European Monetary Union (EMU) is now a reality, debate among economists nonetheless continues about the design and desirability of monetary unions. Since an essential element of a monetary union is the delegation of monetary power to a single centralized entity, one of the key issues...

This paper investigates the quantitative implications of two business cycle models in which aggregate fluctuations arise in response to variations in the process of financial intermediation. In the first, fundamental shocks in the capital accumulation process lead to fluctuations in the real...

This paper provides empirical evidence on macroeconomic complementarities, a restriction on the nature of interaction between individuals in a multi-agent setting. These models imply that activities across agents will be positively correlated, that discrete decisions will be synchronized and...

This paper studies the dynamic properties of an imperfectly competitive economy with inventory holdings. In particular, we focus on the serial correlation in aggregate output and employment produced by the holding of inventories in one sector of the economy and the co-movement between sectors of...

This paper investigates the motivations for, and implications of, the Automobile Industry code under the National Industrial Recovery Act. The amended code contained a provision calling for automobile producers to alter the timing of new model introductions and the annual automobile show as a...