This article discusses the evolution of income inequality in the United States. We focus mainly on the evolution of inequality since the 1960s because more data are available for this period than for earlier periods. We document that income inequality rose in the United States during the period...

This article discusses the economics of sovereign defaults, summarizing lessons from existing work on this issue. In particular, the article describes the costs associated with a sovereign default episode, identifies circumstances that are likely to lead to a default, and discusses how...

The article studies the role of the assumption that countries can be punished with financial exclusion after a sovereign default. It describes the business cycle properties of a sovereign default model with the exclusion punishment and compares them with those of the same model without the...

Does a worker who had a successful career have stronger or weaker incentives to manipulate his reputation than a worker who performed poorly? This paper presents a tractable model that allows us to study career concerns when the strength of a worker's incentives depends on his employment history...

We study how the proximity of elections affects policy choices in a model in which policymakers want to improve their reputation to increase their reelection chances. Policymakers' equilibrium decisions depend on both their reputation and the proximity of the next election. Typically, incentives...

Two striking facts about international capital flows in emerging economies motivate this paper: (1) Governments hold large amounts of international reserves, for which they obtain a return lower than their borrowing cost. (2) Purchases of domestic assets by nonresidents and purchases of foreign...

This paper provides a theoretical framework to quantitatively investigate the optimal accumulation of international reserves to hedge against rollover risk. We study a dynamic model of endogenous default in which the government faces a tradeoff between the insurance benefits of reserves with the...

In modern corporations, ownership is typically separate from control. Given that employees are motivated by self interest, incentive problems arise. Employees are disciplined, in part, by their career concerns. Employees' compensation depends on their reputations — the labor market's beliefs...

We extend the model used in recent quantitative studies of sovereign default, allowing policymakers of different types to alternate in power. We show that a default episode may be triggered by a change in the type of policymaker in office, and that such a default is likely to occur only if there...

A model of mortgage defaults is built into the standard incomplete markets model. Households face income and house-price shocks and purchase houses using long-term mortgages. Interest rates on mortgages are determined in equilibrium according to the risk of default. The model accounts for the...