Contingent Convertible bonds (CoCos) are debt instruments that convert into equity or are written down in times of distress. Existing pricing models assume conversion triggers based on market prices and on the assumption that markets can always observe all relevant firm information. But all...

Foreign aid’s effectiveness in promoting economic growth remains mired in controversy.We examine the impact of the volatility of aid on economic growth, controlling for the level of aid. A four-year panel analysis is conducted encompassing 155 countries over the period 1966-2001. We find that...

In the analysis of the credit crisis of 2007-2010 a clear distinction should be made between (i) the initial shock; (ii) the propagation and amplification of the initial shock to the systemic crisis of the financial markets; and (iii) the transmission of the credit crisis to the real economic...

We analyse the impact of interactions between monetary and fiscal policy on macroeconomic stability. We find that in the presence of sovereign default beliefs a monetary policy, which aims to stabilize inflation through an active interest rate policy, will destabilize the economy if the feedback...

This paper distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility. It summarizes the evidence from diverse literatures on the importance of early life conditions in shaping multiple life skills and the evidence on critical and sensitive investment periods...

We study the global macroeconomic effects of tariffs using a multiregional, general equilibrium model, EAGLE, that we extend by introducing US tariffs against Chinese imports into the US, and subsequently Chinese tariffs against US imports into China, consistent with recent trade policies by the...

The paper considers the problem of volatility co-movement, namely as to whether two financial returns have perfectly correlated common volatility process, in the framework of multivariate stochastic volatility models and proposes a test which checks the volatility co-movement. The proposed test...