This paper assesses the prospects of a 2021 time bomb in SME failures triggered by the generous support policies enacted during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis. Policies implemented in 2020, on their own, do not create a 2021 "time-bomb" for SMEs. Rather, business failures and policy costs remain...

In the past fifteen years key exchange rates have moved in larger and more persistent ways than advocates of flexible rates in the late 1960s would have left anyone free to imagine. Certainly there was no expectation of constancy for nominal exchange rates. But real exchange rate movements of 30...

This paper applies the analytical framework of the monetary approach to exchange rate determination to the analysis of the Dollar/Pound exchange rate during the first part of the 1920's. The analysis uses monthly data up to the return of Britain to gold in 1925. The equilibrium exchange rate is...

We study the transmission of sovereign debt inflow shocks on domestic firms. We exploit episodes of large sovereign debt inflows in six emerging countries that are due to the announcements of these countries' inclusion in two major local-currency sovereign debt indexes. We show that these...

We estimate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on business failures among small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) in seventeen countries using a large representative firm-level database. We use a simple model of firm cost-minimization and measure each firm's liquidity shortfall during and after...

Which is the tighter constraint on private sector investment: weak property rights or limited access to external finance? From a survey of new firms in post-communist countries, we find that weak property rights discourage firms from reinvesting their profits, even when bank loans are available....

The paper develops an analytical framework to discuss the determinants of the premium in the black market for dollars in Brazil. While the specific details of the model were chosen with the Brazilian case in mind, the structure of the model is quite general and suitable for application to black...