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Working Paper
Domestic Policies and Sovereign Default
A model with two essential elements, sovereign default and distortionary fiscal and monetary policies, explains the interaction between sovereign debt, default risk and inflation in emerging countries. We derive conditions under which monetary policy is actively used to support fiscal policy and characterize the intertemporal tradeoffs that determine the choice of debt. We show that in response to adverse shocks to the terms of trade or productivity, governments reduce debt and deficits, and increase inflation and currency depreciation rates, matching the patterns observed in the data for ...
Working Paper
Unions in a frictional labor market
Revised May 2016. We analyze a labor market with search and matching frictions in which wage setting is controlled by a monopoly union. Frictions render existing matches a form of firm-specific capital that is subject to a hold-up problem in a unionized labor market. We study how this hold-up problem manifests itself in a dynamic infinite horizon model with fully rational agents. We find that wage solidarity, seemingly an important norm governing union operations, leaves the unionized labor market vulnerable to potentially substantial distortions because of hold-up. Introducing a tenure ...
Working Paper
Financial Frictions, the Housing Market, and Unemployment
We develop a two-sector search-matching model of the labor market with imperfect mobility of workers, augmented to incorporate a housing market and a frictional goods market. Homeowners use home equity as collateral to finance idiosyncratic consumption opportunities. A financial innovation that raises the acceptability of homes as collateral raises house prices and reduces unemployment. It also triggers a reallocation of workers, with the direction of the change depending on firms? market power in the goods market. A calibrated version of the model under adaptive learning can account for ...
Working Paper
Transparency and Collateral : Central versus Bilateral Clearing
Bilateral financial contracts typically require an assessment of counterparty risk. Central clearing of these financial contracts allows market participants to mutualize their counterparty risk, but this insurance may weaken incentives to acquire and to reveal information about such risk. When considering this trade-off, participants would choose central clearing if information acquisition is incentive compatible. If it is not, they may prefer bilateral clearing, when this choice prevents strategic default while economizing on costly collateral. In either case, participants independently ...
Working Paper
Domestic Policies and Sovereign Default
A model with two essential elements, sovereign default and distortionary fiscal and monetary policies, explains the interaction between sovereign debt, default risk and inflation in emerging countries. We derive conditions under which monetary policy is actively used to support fiscal policy and characterize the intertemporal tradeoffs that determine the choice of debt. We show that in response to adverse shocks to the terms of trade or productivity, governments reduce debt and deficits, and increase inflation and currency depreciation rates, matching the patterns observed in the data for ...
Working Paper
Domestic Policies and Sovereign Default
A model with two essential elements, sovereign default and distortionary fiscal and monetary policies, explains the interaction between sovereign debt, default risk and inflation in emerging countries. We derive conditions under which monetary policy is actively used to support fiscal policy and characterize the intertemporal tradeoffs that determine the choice of debt. We show that in response to adverse shocks to the terms of trade or productivity, governments reduce debt and deficits, and increase inflation and currency depreciation rates, matching the patterns observed in the data for ...
Working Paper
Firm Wages in a Frictional Labor Market
This paper studies a labor market with directed search, where multi-worker firms follow a firm wage policy: They pay equally productive workers the same. The policy reduces wages, due to the influence of firms? existing workers on their wage setting problem, increasing the profitability of hiring. It also introduces a time-inconsistency into the dynamic firm problem, because firms face a less elastic labor supply in the short run. To consider outcomes when firms reoptimize each period, I study Markov perfect equilibria, proposing a tractable solution approach based on standard Euler ...
Working Paper
Markov-Perfect Risk Sharing, Moral Hazard and Limited Commitment
We define, characterize and compute Markov-perfect risk-sharing contracts in a dynamic stochastic economy with endogenous asset accumulation and simultaneous limited commitment and moral hazard frictions. We prove that Markov-perfect insurance contracts preserve standard properties of optimal insurance with private information and are not more restrictive than a long-term contract with one-sided commitment. Markov-perfect contracts imply a determinate asset time-path and a non-degenerate long-run stationary wealth distribution. We show numerically that Markov-perfect contracts provide sizably ...
Working Paper
Endogenous Borrowing Constraints and Stagnation in Latin America
The Latin American debt crisis of the 1980's had a major and long lasting effect on per-capita consumption: its level in 2005 was not that different from that in 1980. This paper studies the long stagnation in per-capita consumption that followed the crisis, and its relationship with recessions and sovereign risk, using a small open economy real business cycle model with complete markets, endogenous borrowing limits (limited commitment), endogenous capital accumulation, and domestic productivity and international interest rate shocks. I find that the model does an excellent job at explaining ...
Report
Fiscal Policy in Debt Constrained Economies
We study optimal fiscal policy in a small open economy (SOE) with sovereign and private default risk and limited commitment to tax plans. The SOE's government uses linear taxation to fund exogenous expenditures and uses public debt to inter-temporally allocate tax distortions. We characterize a class of environments in which the tax on labor goes to zero in the long run, while the tax on capital income may be non-zero, reversing the standard prediction of the Ramsey tax literature. The zero labor tax is an optimal long run outcome if the economy is subject to sovereign debt constraints and ...