If country and currency risk premiums are positively correlated, a negative international liquidity shock harms twice the economy, thereby substantially increasing interest rates. This harmful positive correlation between country and currency risk premiums observed in some countries is called...

In this paper we study the question of debt sustainability from a risk management perspective. The debt accumulation equation for any country involves variables that are stochastic and closely intertwined. When these aspects are taken into consideration the notion of debt sustainability is...

Collective action clauses (CACs) are provisions specifying that a supermajority of bondholders can change the terms of a bond. We study how CACs determine governments’ fiscal incentives, sovereign bond prices and default probabilities in environments with and without contingent debt and...

This paper presents a simple model of debt contracts in order to analyze the conditions under which domestic residents would choose to denominate debts in ``dollars''. In the model, borrowers are producers of non-traded goods, and subject to shocks on prices. The real exchange rate varies in...

We show that very little is needed to create liquidity under-supply in equilibrium: only the presence of credit constraints on demand. We show that the under-supply is a non-monotone function of the demand distortion that causes it, a result that may have interesting implications for emerging...

This paper investigates the properties of optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a two sector small open economy. If the government can optimally select all possible distorting tax rates, then it can implement Pareto efficient outcomes and the Friedman Rule is found to be a necessary condition...

This paper assesses the effects of agency costs and asymmetric information in credit markets. Asymmetric information and agency costs occur whenever lenders delegate control over resources to borrowers, leading to adverse selection, moral hazard and monitoring costs because of the inability to...

This article analyzes the effects of financial liberalization on economic growth, focusing mainly the empirical aspects of this line of research. The text aims to answer fundamental questions put forward by recent literature: What effects has capital account liberalization had on economic...

We argue that cross-country convergence of output per capita should be examined in a fractional-integration time-series context and we propose a new empirical strategy to test it, which is the first one that discriminates between fractional long-run convergence and fractional catching-up. The...

The importance of currency and maturity mismatches in the debt structure of emerging markets is an issue that can hardly be overemphasized. Yet, while many papers have explained how imbalances in the asset and liability structure of emerging markets can cause currency and financial crises, the...