Haoxiang Zhu, Associate Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management; Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; Faculty Affiliate of the MIT GCFP and the […]

Deborah J. Lucas, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Finance and Director, MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy Refet A. Gürkaynak, Professor of Economics and Department Chair, Bilkent University

In fragile economic times, the U.S. government occasionally enacts stimulus programs to provide a jolt to consumer spending. This was certainly the case during the Great Recession, when the government utilized both explicit stimulus programs, such as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 200...

On July 1, 2016, the U.S. territory, which has been mired in a years-long debt crisis, failed to make good on $2 billion of bond payments due, triggering the worst default in its history. Puerto Rico’s governor Alejandro García Padilla has defended the decision to skip the full payment, emphasizing ...