We analyze contagious sovereign debt crises in financially integrated economies. Under financial integration banks optimally diversify their holdings of sovereign debt in an effort to minimize the costs with respect to an individual country's sovereign debt default. While diversification...

We examine the determinants of external crises, focusing on the role of foreign liabilities and their composition. Using a variety of statistical tools and comprehensive data spanning 1970-2011, we find that the ratio of net foreign liabilities to GDP is a significant crisis predictor. This is...

Is the pricing of sovereign risk linear during bearish episodes? Or can initial shocks on economic fundamentals be exacerbated by endogenous factors that create nonlinearities? We test for nonlinearities in the sovereign bond market of European peripheral countries during the debt crisis and...

We provide a comparison of salient organizational features of primary markets for foreign government debt over the very long run. We focus on output, quality control, information provision, competition, pricing, charging and signaling. We find that the market set up experienced a radical...

This paper shows that politics matter in explaining defaults on external and domestic debt obligations. We explore a large number of political and macroeconomic variables using a nonparametric technique to predict safety from default. The advantage of this technique is that it is able to...

This paper seeks to understand the interplay between banks, bank regulation, sovereign default risk and central bank guarantees in a monetary union. I assume that banks can use sovereign bonds for repurchase agreements with a common central bank, and that their sovereign partially backs up any...

This note critically assesses the Basel reform process of capital regulation. It highlights the political nature of this process and argues that the absence of clearly spelled-out societal objectives has been detrimental in furthering stability and soundness of the banking systems in the run-up...

A key precursor of twentieth-century financial crises in emerging and advanced economies alike was the rapid buildup of leverage. Those emerging economies that avoided leverage booms during the 2000s also were most likely to avoid the worst effects of the twenty-first century’s first global...

The recent global financial crisis has ignited a debate on whether easy monetary conditions can lead to greater bank risk-taking. We study this issue in a model of leveraged financial intermediaries that endogenously choose the riskiness of their portfolios. When banks can adjust their capital...

We analyze the impact of financial crises and monetary policy on the supply of wholesale funding liquidity, and also on the compositional supply effects through cross-border and relationship lending. For empirical identification, we draw on the proprietary bank-to-bank European interbank dataset...