The existence of nominal wage and debt contracts is a puzzle. In a model with strategic complementarities, where imperfectly competitive firms inefficiently underinvest, nominal wage or debt contracts are shown to be preferred to indexed contracts. Nominal contracts are an optimal arrangement...

Security baskets and index-linked securities are securities whose values are functions of the cash flows or values of other assets. Intermediaries create security baskets by pooling or bundling more primitive assets such as mortgages, credit card receivables and other loans, or equities as in...

All bond prices plummeted (spreads rose) during the financial crisis, not just the prices of subprime-related bonds. These price declines were because of a banking panic in which institutional investors and firms refused to renew sale and repurchase agreements (repos)—short-term,...

Short-term, collateralized, debt is efficient if agents are willing to lend without producing costly information about the value of the collateral. When the economy relies on this informationally-insensitive debt, information is not renewed over time. If the value of collateral is mean...