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...

We estimate a reduced-form model of credit risk that incorporates stochastic volatility in default intensity via stochastic time-change. Our Bayesian MCMC estimation method overcomes nonlinearity in the measurement equation and state-dependent volatility in the state equation. We implement on...

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...

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...

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...

We investigate the effects of U.S. unconventional monetary policies on sovereign yields, foreign exchange rates, and stock prices in emerging market economies (EMEs), and we analyze how these effects depend on country-specifc characteristics. We find that, although EME asset prices, mainly those...

Estimated dynamic models of business cycles in emerging markets deliver counterfactual predictions for the country risk premium. In particular, the country interest rate predicted by these models is acyclical or procyclical, whereas it is countercyclical in the data. This paper proposes and...

This paper proposes a macroeconomic model with financial intermediaries (banks), in which banks face occasionally binding leverage constraints and may endogenously affect the strength of their balance sheets by issuing new equity. The model can account for occasional financial crises as a result...

Using two newly available ultrahigh-frequency datasets, we investigate empirically how frequently one can sample certain foreign exchange and U.S. Treasury security returns without contaminating estimates of their integrated volatility with market microstructure noise. Using volatility signature...

We study the role played by private and public information in the process of price formation in the U.S. Treasury bond market. To guide our analysis, we develop a parsimonious model of speculative trading in the presence of two realistic market frictions -- information heterogeneity and...