Can gender discrimination explain the limited growth of female election to the House of Representatives? Do female politicians lead to female voter empowerment? We answer these questions with a novel regression discontinuity design using close House primaries between 1982-2012. We find that...

We examine the question of why a government would default on debt denominated in its own currency. Using a newly constructed dataset of 14 emerging markets, we document that the private sector continues to borrow from abroad in foreign currency while sovereigns increasingly borrow from...

Abstract. Why are debt securities so common? I show that debt securities minimize the welfare losses from the moral hazards of excessive risk-taking and lax effort. For any security design, the variance of the security payoff is a statistic that summarizes these welfare losses. Debt securities...

AbstractReplicating the degree of cross-country comovements of macroeconomic aggregates, dynamics of prices and quantities of international trade, and the behavior of consumption and labor remains an important challenge in international business cycle literature. This paper incorporates...

We introduce the model of asset management developed in Gennaioli, Shleifer, and Vishny (GSV, 2014) into a Solow-style neoclassical growth model with diminishing returns to capital. Savers rely on trusted intermediaries to manage their wealth (claims on capital stock), who can charge fees above...

Survey evidence suggests that many investors form beliefs about future stock market returns by extrapolating past returns. Such beliefs are hard to reconcile with existing models of the aggregate stock market. We study a consumption-based asset pricing model in which some investors form beliefs...

This paper introduces and axiomatizes a new class of representations for incomplete preferences called confidence models. Confidence models describe decision makers who behave as if they have probabilistic uncertainty over their true preferences, and are only willing to express a binary...