- “Harvesting official lending conditions“ (with Daragh Clancy, Aitor Erce and Andreja Lenarcic), December 2022.
Countries must comply with loan conditions in order to receive official-sector financial support. After constructing a unique dataset with condition-level information for euro area financial assistance programmes, we demonstrate the importance of creditors’ discretion on the timing and content of assessments in boosting compliance with conditionality: by choosing to assess a relatively small number of conditions and by delaying the assessments of others until conditions could be fulfilled. As a result, compliance with a relatively small subset of conditions is sufficient to satisfy creditors and trigger disbursements, especially fiscal measures aimed at the immediate stabilisation of public finances and those with explicit numerical targets, with structural conditions playing a minor role.
- Making Sovereign Debt Safe with a Financial Stability Fund“ (with Yan Liu and Adrien Wicht), October 2022.
We develop an optimal design of a Financial Stability Fund that coexists with the international debt market. The sovereign can borrow defaultable bonds on the private international market, while having with the Fund a long-term contingent contract subject to limited enforcement constraints. The Fund contract does not have conditionality, but it requires an accurate country-specific risk-assessment (DSA), accounting for the Fund contract. The Fund periodically announces the level of liabilities the country can sustain to achieve this allocation. The Fund is only required minimal absorption of the sovereign debt (nil, if sovereign debt is one-period), but it must provide insurance (Arrow-securities) to the country to make it safe.
- “A Worker’s Backpack as Alternative to the Spanish PAYG Pension System” (with Julián Díaz-Saavedra and João Brogueira de Sousa), September 2022.
Facing an ageing population and historical trends of low employment rates, pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension systems, currently in place in several European countries, imply very large economic and welfare costs in the coming decades. In an overlapping generations economy with incomplete insurance markets and frictional labour markets, an employment fund, which can be used while unemployed or retired, can enhance production efficiency and social welfare.
- “On the Design of a European Unemployment Insurance System” (with Arpad Abraham, Joao Brogueira de Sousa and Lukas Mayr), September 2022.
We study the welfare effects of both existing and counter-factual European unemployment insurance (UI) policies using a rich multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model with labour market frictions. The model successfully replicates several salient features of European labor markets, in particular the cross-country differences in the flows between employment, unemployment and inactivity, as a result of labour market and UI policy differences across euro area countries. We find that mechanisms like the recently introduced European instrument for temporary support to mitigate unemployment risks in an emergency (SURE), which allows national governments to borrow at low interest rates to cover expenditures on unemployment risk, yield sizeable welfare gains.
- “On the optimal design of a Financial Stability Fund“ (with Arpad Abraham, Eva Carceles-Poveda and Yan Liu) July, 2022.
We develop a model of a Financial Stability Fund (Fund) for a union of sovereign countries. By contract design, the Fund never has expected undesired losses while, being default-free, a participant country has greater ability to borrow and share risks than using sovereign debt financing. The Fund contract also provides better incentives for the country to reduce endogenous risks. These efficiency gains arise from the ability of the Fund to offer long-term contingent financial contracts, subject to limited enforcement (LE) and moral hazard (MH) constraints as part of the contingencies.
- “Fiscal and Currency Union with Default and Exit” (with Alessandro Ferrari and Chima Simpson-Bell), April 2021.
We study the optimal designs of a Fiscal Union with independent currencies and of a Monetary and Fiscal Union (Currency Union) and their relative performance. We derive the optimal fiscal-transfer policy in these unions as a dynamic contract subject to enforcement constraints, whereby in a Currency Union each country has the option to unpeg from the common currency, with or without default on existing obligations. Our analysis shows that the lack of independent monetary policy, or an equivalent independent policy instrument, limits the extent of risk-sharing within a Currency Union. It also shows that the optimal state-contingent transfer policy implements a constrained efficient allocation that minimises the losses of the monetary union; that is, the fiscal transfer policy is complementary to monetary policy.