Fundamental models of money, while explicit about the frictions that render money essential, are silent on how agents actually coordinate in its use. This paper studies this coordination problem, providing an endogenous map between the primitives of the environment and the beliefs on the...

This paper studies how constraints on the timing of actions affect equilibrium in intertemporal coordination problems. The model exhibits a unique symmetric equilibrium in cut-o¤ strategies. The risk-dominant action of the underlying one-shot game is selected when the option to delay effort is...

In some coordination problems, an agent's payoff depends on what other agents will do in the future. This paper studies how constraints on the timing of actions affect equilbrium in those problems. While the possibility of waiting longer for others' actions helps agents to coordinate in the good...

A striking fact about prices is the prevalence of "sales": large temporary price cuts followed by prices returning exactly to their former levels. This paper builds a macroeconomic model with a rationale for sales based on firms facing consumers with different price sensitivities. Even if firms...

This paper proposes a model to study how conditional lending and immediate liquidity provision affect incentives for fiscal adjustment in a country facing the risk of sovereign default. Conditional lending provides explicit incentives for fiscal adjustment but immediate liquidity provision is...

This paper proposes a simple macroeconomic model with staggered investment decisions. The expected return from investing depends on demand expectations, which are pinned down by fundamentals and history. Owing to an aggregate demand externality, investment subsidies can improve welfare in this...

This paper studies fiscal policy in a model of sovereign debt and default. A time inconsistency problem arises: since the price of past debt cannot be affected by current fiscal policy and governments cannot credibly commit to a certain path of tax rates, debtor countries choose suboptimally low...

This paper empirically investigates the impact of changes in U.S. real interest rates on sovereign default risk in emerging economies using the method of identification through heteroskedasticity. Policy-induced increases in U.S. interest rates starkly raise default risk in emerging market...

In order to understand inefficient institutions, one needs to understand what might cause the breakdown of a political version of the Coase Theorem. This paper considers an environment populated by ex-ante identical agents and develops a model of power and distribution where institutions (the...