The role of debt and equity changes over time and with the level of development. What are these changes, and why should they systematically occur across different countries and time periods? This article characterizes financial innovation as a dynamic process that both influences and is...

Does monetizing a deficit always result in a higher rate of inflation than bond financing the same deficit? T. J. Sargent and N. Wallace (1981) produced conditions under which the answer was negative ('unpleasant monetarist arithmetic'). Subsequent authors have challenged the empirical validity...

How will capital market imperfections, such as private information and costly state verification, affect international capital market flows between countries that are identical in every way but their initial capital stocks? To answer this question, we devise a dynamic infinite-horizon model with...