The past decade has witnessed a renewed interest in regional trade agreements, with many policymakers and academics seeming to believe that these provide more than the traditional gains from trade. This article examines several possible benefits that regional trade agreements may confer on their...

This paper examines a process of debt renegotiation in which banks possess divergent interests and there is asymmetric information. The authors assume that large banks must exert pressure on small banks in order to obtain participation of these in the provision of new money and in debt...

This paper examines a two-sector small open economy that is subject to shocks in its terms-of-trade. Risk-neutral entrepreneurs use implicit contracts to insure risk-averse workers against fluctuations in their income. The characteristics of these contracts are examined within a general...

Many states are implementing school-finance reforms which will have complex effects on income distribution, intergenerational income mobility, and welfare. This paper analyzes the static and dynamic effects of such reforms by constructing a dynamic general equilibrium model of public-education...

This paper develops a multicommunity model and analyzes policies that affect spending on public education and its distribution across communities. The authors find that policies that on net increase the fraction of the (relatively) wealthiest residents in the poorest community are welfare...

Why do governments so often fail to adopt policies that economists consider to be efficiency-enhancing? The authors answer to this question relies on uncertainty regarding the distribution of gains and losses from reform. They show that there is a bias toward the status quo (and, hence, against...

Commercial bank debts of developing countries are held by large international banks and smaller domestic banks. This paper investigates how debt concentration--the proportion of a country's debt held by large banks relative to small banks--affects the secondary market price for these loans. We...