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Working Paper
Debt dilution and seniority in a model of defaultable sovereign debt
An important ineffciency in sovereign debt markets is debt dilution, wherein sovereigns ignore the adverse impact of new debt on the value of existing debt and, consequently, borrow too much and default too frequently. A widely proposed remedy is the inclusion of seniority clause in sovereign debt contracts: Creditors who lent first have priority in any restructuring proceedings. We incorporate seniority in a quantitatively realistic model of sovereign debt and find that seniority is quite effective in mitigating the dilution problem. We also show theoretically that seniority cannot be fully ...
Working Paper
Maturity, indebtedness, and default risk
In this paper, the authors present a new approach to incorporating long-term debt into equilibrium models of unsecured debt and default. They make three sets of contributions. First, the authors advance the theory of sovereign debt begun in Eaton and Gersovitz (1981) by proving the existence of an equilibrium price function with the property that the interest rate on debt is increasing in the amount borrowed. Second, using Argentina as a test case, they show that unlike a one-period debt model, their model of long-term debt is capable of accounting for the average external debt-to-output ...
Working Paper
Maturity, indebtedness, and default risk
We present a novel and tractable model of long-term sovereign debt. We make two sets of contributions. First, on the substantive side, using Argentina as a test case we show that unlike one-period debt models, our model of long-term sovereign debt is capable of accounting for the average spread, the average default frequency, and the average debt-to-output ratio of Argentina over the 1991-2001 period without any deterioration in the model's ability to account for Argentina's cyclical facts. Using our calibrated model we determine what Argentina's debt, default frequency and welfare would have ...
Working Paper
The Firm Size and Leverage Relationship and Its Implications for Entry and Concentration in a Low Interest Rate World
Larger firms (by sales or employment) have higher leverage. This pattern is explained using a model in which firms produce multiple varieties and borrow with the option to default against their future cash ow. A variety can die with a constant probability, implying that bigger firms (those with more varieties) have lower coefficient of variation of sales and higher leverage. A lower risk-free rate benefits bigger firms more as they are able to lever more and existing firms buy more of the new varieties arriving into the economy. This leads to lower startup rates and greater concentration of ...
Working Paper
Debt dilution and seniority in a model of defaultable sovereign debt
An important source of inefficiency in long-term debt contracts is the debt dilution problem, wherein a borrower ignores the adverse impact of new borrowing on the market value of outstanding debt and, therefore, borrows too much and defaults too frequently. A commonly proposed remedy to the debt dilution problem is seniority of debt, wherein creditors who lent first are given priority in any bankruptcy or restructuring proceedings. The goal of this paper is to incorporate seniority in a quantitatively realistic, infinite horizon model of sovereign debt and default and examine, both ...
Journal Article
Rising disability rolls: causes, effects, and possible cures
Social Security disability insurance began in 1956 as a means of insuring a portion of the earned income of U.S. workers over age 50 against the risk of disability. In 1960, when coverage was extended to all workers, less than half a million workers were collecting benefits, and by 2012 this number had increased to 8.8 million people ? an increase from 0.3 percent to 3.6 percent of the population. Over this period, there have been a number of changes: Initially, the law insured only against permanent disabilities, but in 1965 the definition of disability was expanded to cover impairments ...
Working Paper
A tractable circular city model with an application to the effects of development constraints on land rents
Superseded by working paper 13-37.> A tractable production-externality-based circular city model in which both firms and workers choose location as well as intensity of land use is presented. The equilibrium structure of the city has either (i) no commuting ("mixed-use" form) or (ii) a central business district (CBD) of positive radius and a surrounding residential ring. Regardless of which form prevails, the intra-city variation in all endogenous variables displays the negative exponential form: x(r) = x(0)exr (where r is the distance from the city center and x depends only on preference ...
Working Paper
Incumbency Disadvantage of Political Parties: The Role of Policy Inertia and Prospective Voting
We document that postwar U.S. elections show a strong pattern of ?incumbency disadvantage": If a party has held the presidency of the country or the governorship of a state for some time, that party tends to lose popularity in the subsequent election. To explain this fact, we employ Alesina and Tabellini's (1990) model of partisan politics, extended to have elections with prospective voting. We show that inertia in policies, combined with sufficient uncertainty in election outcomes, implies incumbency disadvantage. We find that inertia can cause parties to target policies that are more ...
Working Paper
Incumbency Disadvantage in U.S. National Politics
We document that postwar U.S. national elections show a strong pattern of ?incumbency disadvantage?: If the presidency has been held by a party for some time, that party tends to lose seats in Congress. A model of partisan politics with policy inertia and elections is presented to explain this finding. We also find that the incumbency disadvantage comes sooner for Democrats than Republicans. Based on the observed Democratic bias in Congress (Democrats, on average, hold more seats in the House and Senate than Republicans), the model also offers an explanation for the second finding.
Working Paper
Endogenous Political Turnover and Fluctuations in Sovereign Default Risk
A sovereign default model in which the sovereign derives private benefits from public office and contests elections to stay in power is developed. The economy?s growth process is modeled as a Markov switching regime, which is shown to be a better description of the data for our set of emerging economies. In the model, consistent with evidence, the sovereign is less likely to be reelected if economic growth is weak. In the low-growth regime, there is higher probability of loss of private benefits due to turnover, which makes the sovereign behave more myopically. This growth-linked variation in ...