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Working Paper
Take it to the Limit : The Debt Ceiling and Treasury Yields
We use the 2011 and 2013 U.S. debt limit impasses to examine the extent to which investors react to a heightened possibility of financial contagion. To do so, we first model the response of yields on government debt to a potential debt limit "breach." We then demonstrate empirically that yields on all Treasuries rose by 4 to 8 basis points during both impasses, while excess yields on bills at risk of delayed principal payments were significantly larger in 2013. Perhaps counterintuitively, our model suggests market participants placed a lower probability on financial contagion resulting from ...
Working Paper
Continuous Markov equilibria with quasi-geometric discounting
We prove that the standard quasi-geometric discounting model used in dynamic consumer theory and political economics does not possess continuous Markov perfect equilibria (MPE) if there is a strictly positive lower bound on wealth. We also show that, at points of discontinuity, the decision maker strictly prefers lotteries over the next period's assets. We then extend the standard model to have lotteries and establish the existence of an MPE with continuous decision rules. The models with and without lotteries are numerically compared, and it is shown that the model with lotteries behaves ...