This paper studies the impact of investor composition on the sovereign debt market and the implied funding costs to borrowers. We construct an aggregate data set of sovereign debt holdings by foreign and domestic bank, non-bank private, and official investors for 95 countries over twenty years....

Over the past decade, non-Paris Club creditors, notably China, have become an important source of financing for low- and middle-income countries. In contrast with typical sovereign debt, these lending arrangements are not public, and other creditors have no information about their magnitude. We...

Governments tend to increase their borrowing at the same time, giving rise to a global fiscal cycle. This global fiscal cycle has a large component that is unexplained by global business cycle variables. We propose a novel explanation for the emergence of the global fiscal cycle: governments'...

In this essay, we argue that key assumptions in international macroeconomic theory, though useful for understanding the economic relationships among developed countries, have been pushed beyond their competence to include relationships between developed economies and emerging markets. The...

We study the distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, across 250,000 grid cells of average area 560 square kilometers. We first document that nearly half of the variation can be explained by a parsimonious set of physical geography attributes. A full set of country...

We evaluate the impact of the global financial crisis (GFC) and recent structural changes in the patterns of hoarding international reserves (IR). We confirm that the determinants of IR hoarding evolve with developments in the global economy. During the pre-GFC period of 1999-2006, gross saving...

This paper analyzes the evolution of the degree of global cyclical interdependence over the period 1960-2005. We categorize the 106 countries in our sample into three groups -- industrial countries, emerging markets, and other developing economies. Using a dynamic factor model, we then decompose...

I show that monetary policy divergence vis-a-vis the U.S. has larger spillover effects in emerging markets than advanced economies. The monetary policy of the U.S. affects domestic credit costs in other countries through its effect on global investors' risk perceptions. Capital flows in and out...

We study the effects of fiscal policy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic at the firm, sector, country and global level. First, we estimate the impact of COVID-19 and policy responses on small and medium sized enterprise (SME) business failures. We combine firm-level financial data from 50...