International real business cycle models have been unable to provide a good explanation for the consumption-output anomaly: in theoretical economies, consumption is more strongly correlated across countries than is output, whereas the opposite is the case in the data. This paper examines an...

Since the beginning of the 1980s, the world has undergone a major shift in thinking about the appropriate economic role of the state. Privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) has been at the heart of this change. The track record on privatization, however, is still very limited. This...

This paper estimates bond-by-bond “haircuts”—realized investor losses—in recent debt restructurings in Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan, Ecuador, Argentina, and Uruguay. We consider both external and domestic retructurings. Haircuts are computed as the percentage difference between the present...

We study the long-term impact of job displacement from a big state owned enterprise as a result of its privatization in a developing country. Our results suggest large reductions in earnings, which persist throughout the years. However, we also find that the displaced worker’s...

The existence of sovereign debt relies on the ability of creditors to impose costs on defaulting debtors. In their seminal contribution Eaton and Gersovitz (1981) began the modern literature on sovereign debt by assuming that creditors could not impose sanctions but could exclude debtor...