Low-income countries continue to face significant challenges in meeting their vast development needs while maintaining a sustainable debt position, even after many of these countries have benefited from substantial debt relief. These challenges are further exacerbated by changes in the financial...

We study a simple general equilibrium model in which investment in a risky technology is subject to moral hazard and banks can extract market power rents. We show that more bank competition results in lower economy-wide risk, lower bank capital ratios, more efficient production plans and...

The recent crises highlighted the role of cross-border banking linkages. This paper proposes two new measures for better capturing creditor banking systems’ foreign credit exposures and borrower countries’ reliance on foreign bank credit, by combining BIS data with bank-level data....

The monetary transmission mechanism in the euro area has been adversely affected by the recent crises. Using survey data on thousands of euro area firms, we study factors that affect the access to finance of SMEs. We find that changes in bank funding costs and borrower leverage matter for...

We study a dynamic economy where credit is limited by insufficient collateral and, as a result, investment and output are too low. In this environment, changes in investor sentiment or market expectations can give rise to credit bubbles, that is, expansions in credit that are backed not by...

We investigate the role of macroprudential policies in mitigating liquidity traps driven by deleveraging, using a simple Keynesian model. When constrained agents engage in deleveraging, the interest rate needs to fall to induce unconstrained agents to pick up the decline in aggregate demand....

We study the sovereign debt duration chosen by the government in the context of a standard model of sovereign default. The government balances off increasing the duration of its debt to mitigate rollover risk and lowering duration to mitigate the debt dilution problem. We present two main...

This paper questions the view that leverage should have forewarned us of the global financial crisis of 2007-09, pointing to several gearing indicators that were neither useful portents of the onset of the crisis nor of its ferocity. Instead it shows, first, that the use of ill-suited collateral...