Why do people save? A strand of the literature has emphasized the role of ‘precautionary' motives; i.e., private agents save in order to mitigate unexpected future income shocks. An implication is that in countries faced with more macroeconomic volatility and risk, private saving should be...

Financial stability is an important policy objective since crises are associated with big economic, social, and political costs. Promoting stability requires preventing 'sudden stops' in capital flows, which are events in which foreign financing abruptly disappears. This paper contributes to the...

Emerging economies are characterized by an extremely high prevalence of informality, small-firm employment and jobs not fit for working from home. These features factor into how the COVID-19 crisis has affected the economy. We develop a framework that, based on accounting identities and actual...

This paper estimates the impact of financial development on industry-level total factor productivity (TFP) growth using a largely unexploited panel of 77 countries with data for 26 manufacturing industries for the years 1963 to 2003. A significant relationship is found between financial...

Natural disasters are an important source of vulnerability in the Caribbean region. Despite being one of the more disaster-prone areas of the world, it has the lowest levels of insurance coverage. This paper examines the vulnerability of Belize's public finance to the occurrence of hurricanes...

This study explores the determinants of corporate bond spreads in emerging markets economies. Using a largely unexploited dataset, the paper finds that corporate bond spreads are determined by firm-specific variables, bond characteristics, macroeconomic conditions, sovereign risk, and global...

This paper analyzes the impact of public investment on private investment in panel of 116 developing countries between 1980 and 2006 using dynamic panel data techniques, finding a strong and robust crowding-out effect that seems to be the norm rather than the exception, both across regions and...

Many economists believe that, while openness to trade increases average GDP growth rates, it also raises output volatility by exposing countries to terms-oftrade shocks. This view does not take into account that, as suggested by a recent strand of the financial fragility literature, commercial...

Financial stability is an important policy objective, since crises are associated with large economic, social and political costs. Promoting stability requires preventing 'sudden stops' in capital flows, which are events in which foreign financing abruptly disappears. This paper contributes to...

We explore the incidence of sudden stops in capital flows on the incentives for building national institutions that secure property rights in a world where sovereign defaults are possible equilibrium outcomes. This paper builds upon the benchmark model of sovereign default and direct creditor...