Balanced growth models are commonly used in macroeconomics because they are consistent with the well-known Kaldor facts regarding economic growth. These models, however, are inconsistent with one of the most striking regularities of the growth process—the massive reallocation of labor from...

This paper explores how real dollarization (dollar indexing of wages), financial dollarization (dollar denomination of financial contracts), and monetary policy interact in a general equilibrium, new open-economy macroeconomics model with real shocks. Real dollarization is avoided as long as the...

This paper develops the theoretical background for the Limited Information Bayesian Model Averaging (LIBMA). The proposed approach accounts for model uncertainty by averaging over all possible combinations of predictors when making inferences about the variables of interest, and it...

This paper uses a stochastic continuous time model of the firm to study how different corporate governance structures affect the agency cost of debt. In the absence of asymmetric information, it shows that control of the firm by debtholders with a minority stake delays the exit decision and...

This paper develops and empirically tests a political economy model of sovereign debt. The main incentive for repaying sovereign debt is to maintain access to international capital markets. However, in a democracy, one generation may choose default regardless of its consequences for future...

This paper provides a political economy analysis of the incentives underpinning a country''s decision to enter a regional trade agreement when a multilateral free trade agreement is available, and of how entering a regional trade agreement affects the incentives to pursue multilateral trade...

The existing literature suggests a number of alternative methods to test for the presence of contagion during financial market crises. This paper reviews those methods and shows how they are related in a unified framework. A number of extensions are also suggested that allow for multivariate...