Notwithstanding announcements of progress, "international original sin" (the denomination of external debt in foreign currency) remains a persistent phenomenon in emerging markets. Although some middle-income countries have succeeded in developing markets in local-currency sovereign debt and...

A surprisingly large number of countries have been able to finance a significant fraction of domestic investment using foreign finance for extended periods. While many of these episodes are in low-income countries where official finance is more important than private finance, we also identify a...

This paper provides new evidence on the rise of the dollar as an international currency, focusing on its role in the conduct of trade and the provision of trade credit. We show that the shift to the dollar occurred much earlier than conventionally supposed: during and immediately after World War...

A financial crisis is a disturbance to financial markets, associated typically with falling asset prices and insolvency among debtors and intermediaries, which spreads through the financial system, disrupting the market's capacity to allocate capital. In this paper we analyze the generation and...

This paper analyzes United States experience with foreign lending in the half-century from 1920. A first question raised by this experience is what triggered the process of United States foreign lending. I conclude that lending was restrained at the beginning of the period by the debt overhang...