The entire difference between a mild downturn and a devastating crisis is the occurrence of sharp fire sales of domestic assets and possibly foreign exchange and the ensuing collapse in the balance sheets of both the financial and nonfinancial sector. Why and how do such crises materialize? And...

This paper studies large reductions in current account deficits and exchange rate depreciations in low- and middle-income countries. It examines which factors help predict the occurrence of a reversal or a currency crisis, and how these events affect macroeconomic performance. Both domestic...

Emerging economies in the post-crisis period increasingly saw portfolio debt inflows from a type of large international investment fund: Multi-Sector Bond Funds (MSBFs). These investors have lacked adequate representation in the literature. This paper constructs a new detailed database from...

This paper analyzes yield spreads on sovereign debt issued by emerging markets using modern data from the 1990s and newly-collected historical data on debt traded in London during 1870–1913, a previous “golden era” for international capital market integration. Applying several empirical...

This study investigates the nonlinear relationship between public debt and sovereign credit ratings, using a wide sample of over one hundred advanced, emerging, and developing economies. It finds that: i) higher public debt lowers the probability of being placed in a higher rating category; ii)...

This paper investigates the value of political institutions for financial markets, using panel data from emerging market countries. We test the hypothesis that changes in political institutions, such as improvements in democratic rights and increased government accountability, have a direct...

This paper reviews the literature on financial crises focusing on three specific aspects. First, what are the main factors explaining financial crises? Since many theories on the sources of financial crises highlight the importance of sharp fluctuations in asset and credit markets, the paper...

Sharp exchange rate depreciations in the East Asian crisis countries (Indonesia, Korea, and Thailand) raised doubts about the efficacy of increasing interest rates to defend the currency. Using a standard monetary model of exchange rate determination, this paper shows that tighter monetary...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the issue of how best to identify speculative asset bubbles (in real-time) remains in flux. This owes to the difficulty of disentangling irrational investor exuberance from the rational response to lower risk based on price behavior alone. In...