Search Results
Journal Article
Europe may provide lessons on preventing mortgage defaults
During the last global recession, house prices fell in some European countries almost as much as in some U.S. states. However, mortgage defaults occurred at a much lower rate in Europe. The authors say the difference might be explained by two regulations that apply in Europe but are used on a limited or much less restrictive basis in the U.S.
Journal Article
On the evolution of income inequality in the United States
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 under study. Furthermore, our article documents periods characterized by a decline in real income for lower income groups. We show that the increase in inequality is concentrated among individuals with higher income and we explain that welfare inequality may have increased less than income inequality ...
Working Paper
Fiscal rules and the sovereign default premium
We find the optimal target values for fiscal rules and measure their aggregate effects using a model of sovereign default. We calibrate the model to an economy that pays a significant sovereign default premium when the government is not constrained by fiscal rules. For different levels of the default premium, we find that a government with a debt of 38 percent of trend income (typical in the case studied here) chooses to commit to a debt ceiling of 30 percent of trend income that starts being enforced four years after its announcement. This rule generates expectations of lower future ...
Working Paper
Heterogeneous borrowers in quantitative models of sovereign default
We extend the model used in recent quantitative studies of sovereign default, allowing policymakers of different types to alternate in power. We show that a default episode may be triggered by a change in the type of policymaker in office, and that such a default is likely to occur only if there is enough political stability and if policymakers encounter poor economic conditions. Under high political stability, political turnover enables the model to generate a weaker correlation between economic conditions and default decisions, a higher and more volatile spread, and lower borrowing levels ...
Journal Article
Legal protection to foreign investors
Foreign investment is typically considered an important source of growth for developing countries. This article describes the legal protection granted to foreign investors and its enforcement mechanisms. Governments have signed international investment agreements intended to protect foreign investors from the risk of expropriation and have increasingly chosen to issue sovereign debt in international financial centers, which expose defaulting governments to litigations in foreign national courts. In most cases, governments have complied with unfavorable rulings of international arbitration ...
Working Paper
Sudden stops, time inconsistency, and the duration of sovereign debt
We study the sovereign debt duration chosen by the government in the context of a standard model of sovereign default. The government balances increasing the duration of its debt to mitigate rollover risk and lowering duration to mitigate the debt dilution problem. We present two main results. First, when the government decides the debt duration on a sequential basis, sudden stop risk increases the average duration by 1 year. Second, we illustrate the time inconsistency problem in the choice of sovereign debt duration: Governments would like to commit to a duration that is 1.7 years shorter ...
Journal Article
The economics of sovereign defaults
Working Paper
A theory of political cycles
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 to influence election results are stronger closer to the election (for a given reputation level), as argued in the political cycles literature, and these political cycles are less important when the policymaker's reputation is better. Our analysis sheds light on other agency relationships in which ...
Working Paper
Mortgage defaults
We incorporate house price risk and mortgages into a standard incomplete market (SIM) model. We calibrate the model to match U.S. data, and we show that the model also accounts for non-targeted features of the data such as the distribution of down payments, the life-cycle prole of homeownership, and the mortgage default rate. In addition, we show that the average coefficients that measure the agents' ability to self-insure against income shocks are similar to those of a SIM model without housing (as presented by Kaplan and Violante, 2010). However, incorporating housing increases the values ...