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Working Paper
Risk-Shifting, Regulation, and Government Assistance
This paper examines an episode when policy response to a financial crisis effectively incentivized financial institutions to reallocate their portfolios toward safe assets. Following a shift to a regime of enhanced regulation and scaled-down public assistance during the savings and loan crisis in 1989, I find that thrifts with a high probability of failure increased their composition of safe assets relative to thrifts with a low probability of failure. The findings also show a shift to safe assets among stock thrifts relative to mutual thrifts, thereby providing evidence of risk-shifting from ...
Working Paper
Designing Unemployment Insurance for Developing Countries
The high incidence of informality in the labor markets of middle-income economies challenges the provision of unemployment protection. We show that, despite informational frictions, introducing an unemployment insurance savings account (UISA) system may provide substantial benefits. This system improves welfare by providing insurance to the unemployed and creating incentives to work in the formal sector. The optimal scheme generates a reduction in unemployment (from 4 to 3 percent), an increase in formality (from 68 to 72 percent), and a rise in total output (by 4 percent). Overall, ...
Working Paper
Designing Unemployment Insurance for Developing Countries
The benefits of implementing Unemployment Insurance Savings Accounts (UISAs) are studied in the presence of the multiple sources of information frictions often existing in developing countries. A benchmark incomplete markets economy is calibrated to Mexico in the early 2000s. The unconstrained optimal allocation would imply very large welfare gains relative to the benchmark economy (similar to an increase in consumption of 23% in every period). More importantly, in presence of multiple sources of information frictions, about half of those potential gains can be accrued through the ...
Working Paper
A Crises-Bailouts Game
This paper studies the optimal design of a liability-sharing arrangement as an infinitely repeated game. We construct a noncooperative model with two agents: one active and one passive. The active agent can take a costly and unobservable action to reduce the incidence of crisis, but a crisis is costly for both agents. When a crisis occurs, each agent decides unilaterally how much to contribute mitigating it. For the one-shot game, when the avoidance cost is too high relative to the expected loss of crisis for the active agent, the first-best is not achievable. That is, the active agent ...