Using a novel dataset on central bank interventions to financial institutions, we examine the impact of capital injection announcements on systemic risk for the banking sector in the U.S. and the euro area between 2008 and 2013. We propose a new measure of options-based systemic risk called...

This paper describes the stylized facts characterizing periods of exceptionally large capital inflows in a sample of 70 middle- and high-income countries over the last 35 years. We identify 155 episodes of large capital inflows and find that these events are typically accompanied by an economic...

Do governments default on debt denominated in their own currency? We introduce a new measure of sovereign credit risk, the local currency credit spread, defined as the spread of local currency bonds over the synthetic local currency risk-free rate constructed using cross currency swaps. We find...

During the 2007-2010 financial crisis, central banks accumulated a vast amount of experience in acting as lender of last resort. This paper reviews the various ways that central banks provided emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) during the crisis, and discusses issues for the design of ELA...

In the chaotic financial environment of Asia in 1997-1998, daily changes in stock prices of about 10 percent became commonplace. This paper analyzes what type of news moves the markets in those days of market jitters. We find that movements are triggered by local and neighbor-country news, with...

Credit market imperfections have been blamed for the depth and persistence of the Great Depression in the USA. Could similar mechanisms have played a role in ending the East Asian miracle? After a brief account of the nature of the recent crises, we use a model of highly levered...

We assess links between China and the rest of emerging Asia. Some commentators have argued that China’s apparent devaluation in 1994 may have contributed to the Asian financial crisis. We argue that the devaluation was not economically important: The more-relevant exchange rate was a floating...

Considerable attention has been paid to the possibility that large-scale IMF-led financing packages may have distorted incentives in international financial markets, leading private investors to provide more credit to emerging market countries, and at lower interest rates, than might otherwise...

While it is clear that the volatility of asset returns is serially correlated, there is no general agreement as to the most appropriate parametric model for characterizing this temporal dependence. In this paper, we propose a simple way of modeling financial market volatility using high...

In this paper, we investigate the welfare implications of alternative financial market structures in a two-country endowment economy model. In particular, we obtain an analytic expression for the expected lifetime utility of the representative household when sovereign bonds are the only...