Principals usually try to elicit the quality and behavior of agents from their performance. While sometimes success or failure in production does not provide accurate information about the agents, there may be activities not directly related to production that constitute a more precise signal. I...

Economic variables move asymmetrically over the business cycle: quickly during crises but slowly during recoveries. I show that this asymmetry is stronger in countries with less developed financial systems and greater financial frictions. Then I explain this fact using a learning model with...

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...

In all markets, firms go through a process of creative destruction: entry, random growth, and exit. In many of these markets there are also regulations that restrict entry, possibly distorting this process. We study the public interest rationale for entry taxes in a general equilibrium model...

In this paper we estimate the early effect of the European Monetary Union (EMU) on trade and its possible effects on the UK. We use a panel data set that includes the most recent information on bilateral trade for 22 developed countries from 1992 through 2001. After 1999, 12 European countries...

Stock markets play a dual role: help allocate capital by conveying information about firms' fundamentals and provide liquidity by quickly turning stocks into cash. We propose a trading model in which these two roles are endogenously related: more intensive use of stocks for liquidity affects...