This paper studies fiscal policy in a model of sovereign debt and default. A time inconsistency problem arises: since the price of past debt cannot be affected by current fiscal policy and governments cannot credibly commit to a certain path of tax rates, debtor countries choose suboptimally low...

The importance of information asymmetries in the capital markets is commonly accepted as one of the main reasons for home bias in investment. The effects of such asymmetries may potentially be reduced through relationships between banks established through bank-to-bank lending. To analyze the...

We modify the Cole and Kehoe model by including domestic debt. According to the original model, a speculative attack on a high debt level issued abroad triggers external debt default. Here, it is possible to inflate away the domestic debt to avoid the external debt default. We consider two...

We analyze the impact that the launch of the EMU had on the currency denomination of private international bond issues in 1990–2006 using micro-level data. Our stylized model predicts that the introduction of the euro would lead to an increase in the share of euro-denominated debt and a...

Conventional wisdom suggests that financial liberalization can help countries insure against idiosyncratic risk. There is little evidence, however, that countries have increased risk sharing despite widespread financial liberalization. We show that the key to understanding this puzzling...

This paper develops an endogenous default risk model for small open economies that interact with risk averse international investors whose preferences exhibit decreasing absolute risk aversion (DARA). By incorporating risk averse investors who trade with an emerging economy, the present model...

Does short-term debt increase vulnerability to financial crisis, or does short-term debt reflect – rather than cause – the incipient crisis? We study the role that short-term debt played in the collapse of the East Asian financial sector in 1997–1998. We alleviate concerns about the...

We study the sensitivity of credit supply to bank financial conditions in 16 emerging European countries before and during the financial crisis. We use survey data on 10,701 applicant and non-applicant firms that enable us to disentangle effects driven by positive and negative shocks to the...

While the global financial crisis was centered in the United States, it led to a surprising appreciation in the dollar, suggesting global dollar illiquidity. In response, the Federal Reserve partnered with other central banks to inject dollars into the international financial system. Empirical...

We examine the first widespread use of capital controls in response to a global or regional financial crisis. In particular, we analyze whether capital controls mitigated capital flight in the 1930s and assess their causal effects on macroeconomic recovery from the Great Depression. We find...