We propose a continuous time model to investigate the impact of inflation credibility on sovereign debt dynamics. At every point in time, an impatient government decides fiscal surplus and inflation, without commitment. Inflation is costly, but reduces the real value of outstanding nominal debt....

Though risk aversion and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution have been the subjects of careful scrutiny, the long-run risks literature as well as the broader literature using recursive utility to address asset pricing puzzles have ignored the full implications of their parameter...

The current financial crisis has its origins in global asset scarcity, which led to large capital flows toward the United States and to the creation of asset bubbles that eventually burst. In its first phase the crash exacerbated the shortage of assets in the world economy, which triggered a...

Three of the most important recent facts in global macroeconomics — the sustained rise in the US current account deficit, the stubborn decline in long run real rates, and the rise in the share of US assets in global portfolios — appear as anomalies from the perspective of...

We show that even when the exchange rate cannot be devalued, a small set of conventional fiscal instruments can robustly replicate the real allocations attained under a nominal exchange rate devaluation in a dynamic New Keynesian open economy environment. We perform the analysis under...

We explore steady-state inequality in an intergenerational model with altruistically linked individuals who experience privately observed taste shocks. When the welfare function depends only on the initial generation, efficiency requires immiseration: inequality grows without bound and...

This paper studies a Diamond–Dybvig model of providing insurance against unobservable liquidity shocks in the presence of unobservable trades. We show that competitive equilibria are inefficient. A social planner finds it beneficial to introduce a wedge between the interest rate implicit...

"Income smoothing" is the process of manipulating the time profile of earnings or earnings reports to make the reported income stream less variable. This paper builds a theory of income smoothing based on the managers' concern about keeping their position or avoiding interference, and on the...

This paper develops a theory of the allocation of formal authority (the right to decide) and real authority (the effective control over decisions) within organizations, and it illustrates how a formally integrated structure can accommodate various degrees of "real" integration. Real authority is...

We consider two kinds of ‘outside opportunity’ that a seller of an indivisible good might have: selling to a different buyer and consuming the good herself. In both models the seller is uncertain about the buyer's valuation, and becomes more pessimistic over time. When the seller...