We revisit the debt overhang question. We first use non-parametric techniques to isolate a panel of countries on the downward sloping section of a debt Laffer curve. In particular, overhang countries are ones where a threshold level of debt is reached in sample, beyond which (initial) debt ends...

In financial and economic policy circles concerned with public debt in developingcountries, a rising debt-GDP ratio is interpreted as a signal of overborrowing, warn-ing of debt defaults if strong fiscal corrections are not adopted in time. This papershows why this interpretation is incorrect by...

The extinction of genetic resources as a consequence of land development, especially in ‘biodiversity hot spots’like rain forests in South America or South East Asia, is becoming a serious problem - not only for local communitiesbut also for international firms in the pharmaceutical...

The paper explores the determinants of up-front fees on sovereign bank loans.Remuneration of bank loans is typically channelled through the floating interestbenchmark, the interest spread, and a battery of fees. There is substantial evidence of thespread paying for long-run sovereign repayment...

Recent research has demonstrated that while government expenditures are countercyclical inmost industrialized countries, they tend to be procyclical in developing countries. We develop adynamic political economy model to explain this phenomenon. In the model, public expendituresprovide insurance...

We study in a general perspective the partial equilibrium incentives and the general equilibrium asset pricing implications of Value-at-Risk (VaR) regulation in continuous time economies with intermediate consumption, stochastic opportunity set, and heterogenous attitudes to risk. Our findings...

We present an object-oriented software framework allowing to specify, solve, and estimate nonlinear dynamic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. The implemented solution methods for finding the unknown policy function are the standard linearization around the deterministic steady state, and a...

We present a comprehensive framework for Bayesian estimation of structural nonlinear dynamic economic models on sparse grids. The Smolyak operator underlying the sparse grids approach frees global approximation from the curse of dimensionality and we apply it to a Chebyshev approximation of the...

In an in‡uential series of contributions, Kraay and Ventura (2000, 2003) o¤er a“new rule” for the current account: in response to a temporary income shock, thechange in the current account is equal to the change in saving times the ratio of netforeign assets to wealth. We analyze the...

This article studies the e¤ect of limited commitment on stock return volatility in a dynamicgeneral equilibrium economy populated by investors with heterogeneous beliefs. Due to het-erogeneity of beliefs investors disagree about the fundamentals, introducing an additional riskfactor denoted...