The U.S. economy has recently experienced two, seemingly unrelated, phenomena: a large increase in post-retirement life expectancy and a major expansion in securitization and shadow banking activities. We argue they are intimately related. Agents rely on financial intermediaries to save for...

How does investors' information about a country's fundamentals, and the fact that this information may be asymmetrically held, affect a country's financing cost? Motivated by this question, and by the observation that sovereign bonds are usually auctioned in large lots to a large number of...

The Covid-19 pandemic is a major test for governments around the world. We study the political consequences of (mis-)managing the Covid crisis by constructing a high-frequency dataset of government approval for 35 countries. In the first weeks after the outbreak, approval rates for incumbents...

How does investors' information about a country's fundamentals, and the fact that this information may be asymmetrically held, affect a country's financing cost? Motivated by this question, and by the observation that sovereign bonds are usually auctioned in large lots to a large number of...

Sovereign bonds are highly divisible, usually of uncertain quality, and auctioned in large lots to a large number of investors. This leads us to assume that no individual bidder can affect the bond price, and to develop a tractable Walrasian theory of Treasury auctions in which investors are...

What a country has done in the past, and what other countries are doing in the present, can feedback for good or for ill in debt markets. We develop a simple model of sovereign bond markets with global investors and endogenous information acquisition about fundamental default probabilities. This...

We show that political booms, measured by the rise in governments' popularity, predict financial crises above and beyond other better-known early warning indicators, such as credit booms. This predictive power, however, only holds in emerging economies. We show that governments in emerging...

We show that political booms, measured by the rise in governments' popularity, predict financial crises above and beyond other better-known early warning indicators, such as credit booms. This predictive power, however, only holds in emerging economies. We show that governments in emerging...

We show that political booms, measured by the rise in governments' popularity, predict financial crises above and beyond other better-known early warning indicators, such as credit booms. This predictive power, however, only holds in emerging economies. We show that governments in emerging...

The Covid-19 pandemic is a major test for governments around the world. We study the political consequences of (mis-)managing the Covid crisis by constructing a highfrequency dataset of government approval for 35 countries. In the first weeks after the outbreak, approval rates for incumbents...