This paper considers how an international lender of last resort (LOLR) can prevent self-fulfilling banking and currency crises in emerging economies. We compare two different arrangements: one in which the international LOLR injects liquidity into international financial markets, and one in...

This paper studies the role of unemployment in sterling's interwar experience. According to most narrative accounts, the proximate cause of the 1931 sterling crisis was a high and rising unemployment rate that placed pressure on British governments to pursue reflationary policies. We present a...

We study the interplay of optimal ex-ante (macroprudential) and ex-post (monetary or fiscal stimulus) measures to respond to systemic financial crises in a tractable model of fire sales. We find that it is generally optimal to use both, rejecting the Greenspan doctrine to only intervene ex post....

Both the literature and new empirical evidence show that exchange rate regimes differ primarily by the noisiness of the exchange rate, not be measurable macroeconomic fundamentals. This motivates a theoretical analysis of exchange rate regimes with noise traders. The presence of noise traders...

Financially closed economies insure themselves against current-account shocks using international reserves. We characterize the optimal management of reserves using an open-economy model of precautionary savings and emphasize several results. First, the welfare-based opportunity cost of reserves...

This paper uses a dynamic optimization model to estimate the welfare gains that a small open economy can derive from insuring against natural disasters with catastrophe (CAT) bonds. We calibrate the model by reference to the risk of earthquakes, floods and storms in developing countries. We find...