This paper constructs a new measure of currency mismatch in the banking sector that controls for bank lending to unhedged borrowers. This measure explicitly takes into account the indirect exchange rate risk that banks undertake when they lend to borrowers that will not be able to repay in the...

This analysis tests the price discovery relationship between sovereign CDS premia and bond yield spreads on the same reference entity. The theoretical no-arbitrage relationship between the two credit spreads is confronted with daily data from six Euro-area countries over the period 2004-2011. As...

A key precursor of twentieth-century financial crises in emerging and advanced economies alike was the rapid buildup of leverage. Those emerging economies that avoided leverage booms during the 2000s also were most likely to avoid the worst effects of the twenty-first century’s first global...

We build a model where sovereign defaults weaken banks’ balance sheets because banks hold sovereign bonds, causing private credit to decline. Stronger financial institutions boost default costs by amplifying these balance-sheet effects. This yields a novel complementarity between public debt...

Drawing on a newly-collected data set on bond yields, macroeconomic variables, and news of various categories for a panel of emerging markets, we provide the first comparative analysis of the determinants of sovereign bond spreads in the first era of financial globalization and bond finance...

We argue that emerging economies borrow short term due to the high risk premium charged by bondholders on long-term debt. First, we present a model where the debt maturity structure is the outcome of a risk sharing problem between the government and bondholders. By issuing long-term debt, the...

There is a large and growing literature that studies the effects of weak enforcement institutions on economic performance. This literature has focused almost exclusively on primary markets, in which assets are issued and traded to improve the allocation of investment and consumption. The general...

This paper builds a new dataset with detailed information on the universe of foreign government bonds issued in New York in the 1920s and uses these data to describe the behavior of the financial intermediaries which operated in the New York market during the period leading to the interwar debt...

The high level of trade and financial integration reached by Europe both today and under the late 19th century gold standard suggests that important lessons can be learned by looking at past record to inform current issues. In this article, we draw a fresh picture of the European gold standard,...

Conventional wisdom says that, in the absence of sufficient default penalties, sovereign risk constraints credit and lowers welfare. We show that this conventional wisdom rests on one implicit assumption: that assets cannot be retraded in secondary markets. Once this assumption is relaxed, there...