The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

The purpose of this study is to draw attention to the linkages between country risk and the openness of an economy, and to demonstrate that in the long run the openness of an economy is endogenously determined by the interaction between endowments and policies. The presence of country risk poses...

Conventional wisdom holds that lack of government commitment deters foreign investment in developing countries. Yet this explanation is not convincing because some econometric studies have found little support for the role of political risk and host governments can offer upfront subsidies that...

Historically, sovereign debt in local currency has been considered safer than debt in foreign currency. Yet the literature offers scant theoretical or empirical guidance as to why such a gap exists, or why it appears to have slowly and steadily diminished for all regions over the past two...

We build a Real Options model to assess the importance of private provision and the impact of expropriation risk on investment timing, investment volumes, governmental costs and social welfare. We consider two types of businesses (essential and non essential businesses) and two stages (operating...

Evidence on international capital flows suggests that foreign direct investment (FDI) is less volatile than other financial flows. To explain this finding, I model international capital flows under the assumptions of imperfect enforcement of financial contracts and inalienability of FDI....