The purpose of the UDROP proposal is to prevent debt rollover crises for foreign-currency-denominated debt instruments. For such liabilities, there is no international analogue to the domestic lender of last resort or to domestic deposit insurance. UDROP stands for Universal Debt Rollover Option...

This paper studies sharp reductions in current account deficits and large exchange rate depreciations in low- and middle-income countries. It examines which factors help predict the occurrence of a reversal or a currency crisis, and how these events affect macroeconomic performance. It finds...

We use a panel of annual data for over one hundred developing countries from 1971–92 to characterize currency crashes. We define a currency crash as a large change of the nominal exchange rate that is also a substantial increase in the rate of change of nominal depreciation. We examine the...

We argue that emerging economies borrow short term due to the high risk premium charged by bondholders on long-term debt. First, we present a model where the debt maturity structure is the outcome of a risk sharing problem between the government and bondholders. By issuing long-term debt, the...

A number of developing countries have run large and persistent current account deficits in both the late-1970s/early-1980s and in the early-1990s, raising the issue of whether these persistent imbalances are sustainable. This paper puts forward a notion of current account sustainability and...

We examine the determinants of capital flows to four developing countries during the 1990s using an explicitly disequilibrium econometric framework in which the supply and demand for capital are not necessarily equal, and the actual amount of the flow is determined by the ‘short side’ of the...

We investigate the pricing of ‘Brady’ bonds that are issued by the governments of five developing countries as part of debt and debt service reduction agreements. We first present a measure of credit quality that takes account of the individual features of each bond and is comparable across...

The current account has always been a neglected variable in the management of the Euro area and in the assessment of its members' performance; so has, as a consequence, the savings-investment balance. This paper first reviews the arguments that explain this attitude and justify, under some...

The paper starts from the premise that the debate on the ‘new architecture’ of the international financial system should be based on a theory that endogenizes the structure of countries' external liabilities. I present a model in which the maturity of a country's external sovereign debt is...

A considerable literature has examined the causes, consequences, and policy responses to surges in international capital flows. A related strand of papers has attempted to catalog current account reversals and capital account "sudden stops." This paper offers an encompassing approach with an...