In March 1989, U.S. Treasury Secretary Brady proposed a new approach to resolving the developing country debt problem and restoring the creditworthiness of restructuring countries. The Brady Plan encouraged market-based reductions in debt and debt service for countries implementing economic...

We use a simple model to show why previous empirical studies of budget policy effects are flawed. Due to an identification problem, those studies' findings can be shown to be consistent with policies either mattering or not. We argue that this problem is difficult and not likely to be resolved soon.

In this article, I suggest that incomplete markets and transaction costs are crucial for explaining the high equity premium and the low risk-free rate. I first demonstrate the failure of the complete frictionless markets model in explaining these return puzzles and then show how introducing...