We empirically analyse the appropriateness of indexing emerging market sovereign debt to US real interest rates. We find that policy-induced exogenous increases in US rates raise default risk in emerging market economies, as hypothesised in the theoretical literature. However, we also find...

Time series of daily data for Greek sovereign risk have been compiled and analysed statistically to shed light on the way that historical events, including political and institutional changes, determined the creditworthiness of the Greek government on the London stock market from the start of...

Time series of daily data for Greek sovereign risk have been compiled and analysed statistically to shed light on the way that historical events, including political and institutional changes, determined the creditworthiness of the Greek government on the London stock market from the start of...

This paper presents a model of financial resource curse, i.e. episodes of abundant access to foreign capital coupled with weak productivity growth. We study a two-sector, tradable and non-tradable, small open economy. The tradable sector is the engine of growth, and productivity growth is...

Jim Tobin, who died on March 11, 2002 at the age of 84, was one of giants of economics of the second half of the twentieth century and the greatest macroeconomist of his generation. Tobin’s influence on macroeconomic theory is so pervasive - so much part of our professional ‘acquis’ - that...

In the debate concerning a country’s structural weaknesses there is an obvious neglect of space issues, an important component of which is regional imbalances. Yet, the persistence of such imbalances within countries has dictated the continuous investigation of their causes and of the required...

We consider an economy where competing political parties alternate in office. Due to rent-seeking motives, incumbents have an incentive to set public expenditures above the socially optimum level. Parties cannot commit to future policies, but they can forge a political compromise where each...

We estimate the extent to which idiosyncratic and disaggregate macro shocks (such as regional and industry shocks) are not shared in the economy. Comparing the degree to which idiosyncratic and disaggregate macro shocks are not shared grants a deeper understanding as to why the economy lacks in...

We analyse self-reported measures of satisfaction with life in a transition country, Kyrgyzstan, using 1993 household survey data. We test whether higher levels of satisfaction are associated with greater economic well-being. This hypothesis is strongly supported by the data. Unhappiness is...