We estimate the causal effect of sovereign default on the equity returns of Argentine firms. We identify this effect by exploiting changes in the probability of Argentine sovereign default induced by legal rulings in the case of NML Capital, Ltd. v. Republic of Argentina. We find that a 10 percent increase in the probability of default causes a 6 percent decline in the value of Argentine equities and a 1 percent depreciation of a measure of the exchange rate. We examine the channels through which a sovereign default may affect the economy.

We derive a new cost of information in rational inattention problems, the neighborhood-based cost functions, starting from the observation that many settings involve exogenous states with a topological structure. These cost functions are uniformly posterior separable and capture notions of perceptual distance. This second property ensures that neighborhood-based costs, unlike mutual information, make accurate predictions about behavior in perceptual experiments. We compare the implications of our neighborhood-based cost functions with those of the mutual information in a series of applications: perceptual judgments, the general environment of binary choice, regime-change games, and linear-quadratic-Gaussian settings.