We study price discrimination where consumers know at the time of contracting only the distribution of their valuations but subsequently learn their actual valuations. Consumers are sequentially screened, as in a menu of refund contracts. Initial valuation uncertainty can differ in terms of first-order stochastic dominance or mean-preserving-spread. In both cases, optimal mechanisms depend on informativeness of consumers' initial knowledge about their valuations, not on uncertainty that affects all consumers. It can be optimal to “subsidize” consumers with smaller valuation uncertainty through low refund to reduce the rent to those who face greater uncertainty and purchase more “flexible” contracts.

We characterize the values of government debt and the debt's maturity structure under which financial crises brought on by a loss of confidence in the government can arise within a dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium model. We also characterize the optimal policy response of the government to the threat of such a crisis. We show that when the country's fundamentals place it inside the crisis zone, the government may be motivated to reduce its debt and exit the crisis zone because this leads to an economic boom and a reduction in the interest rate on the government's debt. We show that this reduction can be gradual if debt is high or the probability of a crisis is low. We also show that, while lengthening the maturity of the debt can shrink the crisis zone, credibility-inducing policies can have perverse effects.