Since the start of the financial crisis, industrial country public debt levels have increased dramatically. And they are set to continue rising for the foreseeable future. A number of countries face the prospect of large and rising future costs related to the ageing of their populations. In this...

This paper computes welfare-maximizing monetary and tax policy feedback rules in acalibrated dynamic general equilibrium model with sticky prices. The government makesexogenous final good purchases, levies a proportional income tax, and issues nominalone-period bonds. A quadratic approximation...

This paper revisits the role played by myopia in generating a theoreticalrationale for pay-as-you-go social security in dynamically efficient economies.Contrary to received wisdom, if the real interest rate is exogenously fixed, enough myopiamay justify public pensions but never alongside...

Market participants' risk attitudes, wealth and portfolio composition influence their positions in apegged foreign currency and, therefore, may have important effects on the sustainability of currencypegs. We analyze such effects in a global game model of currency crises with continuous...

This paper studies a dynamic model of crises with timing frictions that combines the mainaspects of Morris and Shin (1998) and Frankel and Pauzner (2000). The usual arguments forexistence and uniqueness of equilibrium cannot be applied. It is shown that the model has aunique equilibrium within...

This paper analyses predictions of a simple model of currency crises in which the peg will beabandoned when the currency overvaluation hits a certain threshold, unknown to the agents. Due tolearning about the threshold, some features usually observed in the data and identified with modelswith...

In a country with high probability of default, higher interest rates may render the currency lessattractive if sovereign default is costly. This paper develops that intuition in a simple model andestimates the effect of changes in interest rates on the exchange rate in Brazil using data from...

The financial crisis has re-ignited the fierce debate about the merits of financial globalizationand its implications for growth, especially for developing countries. The empirical literaturehas not been able to conclusively establish the presumed growth benefits of financialintegration. Indeed,...

This paper compares the welfare under two standard alternative exchange rate regimes, fixed andflexible, in a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium two-country setting. Conventional wisdomholds that countries often prefer low exchange-rate variability to stabilize trade. This may explainthe...

According to the Balassa-Samuelson e¤ect, productivity gains in the domestic tradable sectorraise the relative price of domestic non-tradables causing deviations from the purchasing powerparity. In the literature, the Balassa-Samuelson e¤ect is typically invoked to explain the Penne¤ect,...