The aftermath of sovereign default episodes for emerging and developed economies since the 1980s underscores the crucial role of the legal jurisdiction under which debt is issued. This paper provides a quantitative framework for evaluating the trade-offs between issuing domestic and foreign-law bonds from the sovereign's perspective. While foreign-law bonds offer stronger legal protections for investors and thus command higher prices, domestic-law bonds are more easily restructured after default.  We document differences in the maturity structures of both types of debt for a set of emerging market economies. Then, we disentangle the effects of differences in maturities and recovery rates in shaping the composition of the sovereign's portfolio. The model reveals that when recovery rates are similar, the sovereign favors bonds with shorter maturities. However, when recovery rates diverge, the sovereign prefers to issue the asset with a higher recovery rate. The dominant factor hinges on the magnitude of recovery rate differences between foreign and domestic-law debt after default. 

Presented (by me or coauthors): Society for Advancements in Economic Theory (SAET, Ischia - 2025), Meeting of Brazilian Econometric Society (Natal - 2024), Minnesota-Wisconsin Workshop, 6th Biennal Conference on Financial Stability (Mexico City - 2025)

Awards: Minnesota Supercomputer Institute Poster Conference (2nd place), Minnesota Job Market Fellowship.

We study the problem of a sovereign choosing whether to disclose information to international lenders in an Eaton and Gersovitz (1981) environment. The government faces a trade-off: full disclosure ensures that debt is sold at high prices in good times, but hampers new debt issuance in bad times. Conversely, non-disclosure creates an insurance opportunity through adverse selection. The unique equilibrium under no-disclosure is a pooling equilibrium that allows the sovereign to take more debt in bad times at the cost of worse prices obtained in good times. We characterize the sovereign’s optimal choice of information disclosure and show that non-disclosure is preferred when deadweight losses from defaulting are small. We argue that our model is consistent with the behavior of the Mexican government before and during the 1994-1995 Mexican Crisis.

Presented (by me or coauthors): Society for Advancements in Economic Theory (SAET, Santiago - 2024), Minnesota-Wisconsin Workshop, Midwest Macro (Spring 2026)*.

Awards:  Sandor Poster Conference UMN (3rd place); 3rd year paper competition (2nd place)

We develop a model of search in OTC markets with asymmetric information and trade occurring under double-sided uncertainty over asset quality, where holding the asset does not necessarily translate into knowing its quality. This leads to deterioration of market information conditions over subsequent trades, causing both sellers and buyers to become more pessimistic even though aggregate asset quality remains unchanged. If re-trade opportunities are frequent, information in the economy becomes coarser, hindering market liquidity and volume of trade. 

Presented (by me or coauthors):  Meeting of Brazilian Econometric Society (Rio de Janeiro - 2023), RICE-LEMMA  (2024), 

This paper investigates how sectoral linkages amplify or diminish misallocation at the intensive and extensive margins. Our analysis is based on a multisector general equilibrium model with input–output linkages, heterogeneous entrepreneurial abilities, and endogenous occupational choice. Distortions affect the intensive use of production inputs and they also impact the agents’ occupational decisions, misallocating the mass and type of entrepreneurs in different sectors of production. When the most distorted sectors are upstream (downstream), input–output linkages amplify (diminish) the loss from entreprenurial misallocation. We calibrate the model to the US and quantify the output losses from sectoral corporate taxes, decomposing the role of networks and the extensive margin decisions. We find that sectoral linkages quadruple the loss from the misallocation of entrepreneurs. We study an entry subsidy program, showing that it should target those sectors whose marginal entrepreneurs suffer larger profit losses, even if they are not necessarily the most distorted.