The 1990s have witnessed pronounced boom-bust cycles in emerging-markets lending, culminating in the Asian financial and currency crisis of 1997-98. By examining the links between sovereign credit ratings and dollar bond yield spreads over 1989-97, this paper aims at broad empirical content for...

A transition finance country pilot was initiated by the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in partnership with the government of Cabo Verde. The study aims to capture the challenges facing Cabo Verde following graduation from Least Developed Country (LDC) to Lower Middle Income Category...

Syndicated lending is a widely practiced alternative to traditional bilateral lending and within Europe the syndicated loan market increased significantly during the 2000s. Using a dataset consisting of 4166 European banks, the authors examine the factors that determine the bank's willingness to...

This paper surveys and assesses the academic literature on defining, measuring, and identifying financial contagion and the various channels by which it can occur. It also includes new empirical analysis of recent trends and causes of contagion, highlighting contagion risks in the euro area. The...

This paper documents the changing international exposures of U.S. bank balance sheets since the mid-1980s. U.S. banks have foreign positions heavily concentrated in Europe, with more volatile flows to other regions of the world. In recent years some cross-border claims on Latin American...

The 2008-2009 financial crises, while originating in the United States, witnessed a drop in asset prices and output that was at least as large in the rest of the world as in the United States. A widely held view is that this was the result of global transmission through leveraged financial...

This paper uses micro-level data on mutual funds from different financial centers investing in equity and bonds to study how investors and managers behave and transmit shocks across countries. The paper finds that the volatility of mutual fund investments is driven quantitatively by both the...

This book analyzes in depth all major derivatives debacles of the last half century including the multi-billion losses and/or bankruptcy of Metallgesellschaft (1994), Barings Bank (1995), Long Term Capital Management (1998), Amaranth (2006), Soci¨¦t¨¦ G¨¦n¨¦rale (2008) and AIG (2008). It...

This paper examines the evolving importance of banks and securities markets during the process of economic development. We find that as countries develop economically, (1) the size of both banks and securities markets increases relative to the size of the economy, (2) the association between an...

We use quanto credit default swaps to analyse the impact of a credit event in the Eurozone on the Dollar-Euro exchange rate. In light of the European debt crisis, market participants are willing to pay more for protection against a sovereign credit event if it is denominated in US Dollars rather...