For decades credit rating agencies were viewed as trusted arbiters of creditworthiness and their ratings as important tools for managing risk. The common narrative is that the value of ratings has been compromised by the evolution of the industry to a form where issuers pay for ratings. In this...

What a country has done in the past, and what other countries are doing in the present can feedback for good or for ill. We develop a model which can address hysteresis and contagion in sovereign debt markets. When a country's fundamentals change, those changes affect information acquisition...

This study exploits panel data from 18 countries to assess the contributions of cartelization policies, monetary shocks, and productivity shocks on macroeconomic activity during the Great Depression. To construct a parsimonious and common model framework, we use the fact that many cartel...

This paper constructs a dynamic model of health insurance to evaluate the short- and long run effects of policies that prevent firms from conditioning wages on health conditions of their workers, and that prevent health insurance companies from charging individuals with adverse health conditions...

This paper extends the methodology developed in Chien, Cole and Lustig (2011 & 2012) (hereafter CCL2011 and CCL2012, respectively) to analyze and compute the equilibria of economies with heterogeneous agents who have different asset trading technologies and are subject to both aggregate and...

For decades credit rating agencies were viewed as trusted arbiters of creditworthiness and their ratings as important tools for managing risk. The common narrative is that the value of ratings was compromised by the evolution of the industry to a form where issuers pay for ratings. In this paper...

Our paper examines whether the failure of unsophisticated investors to rebalance their portfolios can help to explain the countercyclical volatility of aggregate risk compensation in financial markets. To answer this question, we set up a model in which a large mass of investors do not rebalance...

This paper evaluates the gains from international risk sharing in some simple general-equilibrium models with output uncertainty. Under empirically plausible calibration, the Incremental loss from a ban on international portfolio diversification is estimated to be quite small--0.15 percent of...

In this paper, we put forward a theory of the optimal capital structure of the firm based on Jensen's (1986) hypothesis that a firm's choice of capital structure is determined by a trade-off between agency costs and monitoring costs. The problem of determining the optimal capital structure of...