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. More specifically, the paper incorporates standard job assignments into the main model in Holmstrom (1999). Equilibrium wages, equilibrium...

This paper studies Holmstrom's [1999] seminal model of career concerns, but considers that a small change in the beliefs about the agent's future productivity may imply a large change in his compensation---because, for example, the agent may be fired or promoted. This allows us to study how the...

We extend the standard Eaton and Gersovitz (1981) sovereign default model to study bailout policies. In our setup a country that concentrates a significant fraction of bond holders decide on a period by period basis whether to bailout a debtor government. The combination of bailout policies and...

We measure the effects of debt dilution on sovereign default risk and show how these effects can be mitigated with debt contracts promising borrowing-contingent payments. First, we calibrate a baseline model `a la Eaton and Gersovitz (1981) to match features of the data. In this model, bonds'...

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...

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...

This paper argues that both horizontal and intertemporal competition among recipient governments are needed in order to ensure incentives for effective utilization of targeted transfers. This has implications for budgeting frameworks and the types of information needed that might be amenable to...

The maturity structure of debt can have financial and real consequences. Short-term debt exposes borrowers to rollover risk (where the terms of financing are renegotiated to the detriment of the borrower) and is associated with financial crises. Moreover, debt maturity can have an impact on the...

This paper surveys the literature on sovereign debt from the perspective of understanding how sovereign debt differs from privately issue debt, and why sovereign debt is deemed safe in some countries but risky in others. The answers relate to the unique power of the sovereign. One the one hand,...