Research

Emerging-market governments choose both the currency and maturity of their debt. I document a new fact: domestic-currency sovereign debt has systematically shorter maturity than foreign-currency debt. I develop a dynamic sovereign-debt model with endogenous default and inflation in which the government chooses among short- and long-term bonds denominated in domestic and foreign currency. Domestic-currency and long-term debt provide insurance against bad states but create inflation, default, and dilution incentives that lower their prices today. Foreign-currency and short-term debt provide stronger discipline but less insurance. When currency and maturity are chosen jointly, these forces make the extreme portfolios unattractive in normal states, leading governments to rely primarily on short-term domestic-currency and long-term foreign-currency debt. Calibrated to Türkiye, the model generates a domestic-to-foreign maturity ratio close to that observed in the data and shifts issuance toward short-term foreign-currency debt in adverse states.

Many major US jurisdictions have implemented pay transparency laws that require firms to advertise wage offers in vacancy postings. Using data on the near universe of job postings and representative survey data in a difference-in-differences framework, we find that these laws increased the fraction of postings with wage information by 24.7 percentage points. This translated to average real wage increases of 3.2%-4.4% in Colorado and 0.6%-1.3% in California and Washington. We further consistently find significant positive effects on real wages for workers who are male, have a college-degree, or are over forty years old.