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We provide conditions for the feasibility of robust Pareto-improving (RPI) policies when markets are incomplete and the interest rate is below the growth rate. We allow for arbitrary heterogeneity in preferences and income risk and a wedge between the return to capital and bonds. An RPI improves risk sharing and can induce a more efficient level of capital. Elasticities of aggregate savings to changes in interest rates are the crucial ingredients to the feasibility of RPIs. Government debt may complement rather than substitute for capital in an RPI. Our analysis emphasizes the welfare-improving qualities of government bonds versus explicit redistribution. (JEL D52, E43, E62, H20, H63) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging markets have experienced large human and economic costs from coronavirus disease 2019, and their tight fiscal space has limited the support extended to their citizens. We study the impact of an epidemic on economic and health outcomes by integrating epidemiological dynamics into a sovereign default model. The sovereign's option to default tightens fiscal space and results in an epidemic with limited mitigation and depressed consumption. A quantitative analysis of our model accounts well for the dynamics of fatalities, social distancing, consumption, sovereign debt, and spreads in Latin America. We find that because of default risk, the welfare cost of the pandemic is about a third higher than it is in a version of the model with perfect financial markets. We study debt relief programs and find a compelling case for their implementation. These programs deliver large social gains, improving health and economic outcomes for the country at no cost to international lenders or financial institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper measures the output costs of sovereign risk by combining a sovereign debt model with firm- and bank-level data. An increase in sovereign risk lowers the price of government debt and has an adverse impact on banks' balance sheets, disrupting their ability to finance firms. The resulting fall in credit supply impacts firms directly, as they need to borrow at higher interest rates, and indirectly through general equilibrium effects on the price of inputs and other goods. Importantly, firms are not equally affected by these developments: those that have greater financing needs and that borrow from banks that hold more government debt are mostly affected by the change in borrowing rates, while firms that do not borrow are only impacted indirectly. We show that these direct and indirect effects can be recovered using a firm-level regression, which we estimate using Italian data. We calibrate our model to match the measured firm-level elasticities and find that heightened sovereign risk was responsible for one-third of the observed output decline during the Italian debt crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the positive and normative consequences of government bond issuances in a New Keynesian model with heterogeneous agents, focusing on how the stock of government bonds affects the cross-sectional allocation of resources in the spirit of Samuel-son (1958). We characterize the Pareto optimal levels of government bonds and the associated monetary policy adjustments that should accompany Pareto-improving bond issuances. The paper introduces a simple phase diagram to analyze the global equilibrium dynamics of inflation, interest rates, and labor earnings in response to changes in the stock of government debt. The framework also provides a tractable tool to explore the use of fiscal policy to escape the Effective Lower Bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates and the resolution of the "forward guidance puzzle." A common theme throughout is that following the monetary policy guidance from the standard Ricardian framework leads to excess fluctuations in income and inflation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the COVID-19 epidemic in emerging markets that face financial frictions and its mitigation through social distancing and vaccination. We find that restricted vaccine availability in emerging markets, as captured by limited quantities and high prices, renders the pandemic exceptionally costly compared to economies without financial frictions. Improved access to financial markets enables better response to the delay in vaccine supplies, as it supports more stringent social distancing measures prior to wider vaccine availability. We show that financial assistance programs to such financially constrained countries can increase vaccinations and lower fatalities, at no present-value cost to the international community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]