We consider public debt from a long-term historical perspective, showing how the purposes for which governments borrow have evolved over time. Periods when debt-to-GDP ratios rose explosively as a result of wars, depressions and financial crises also have a long history. Many of these episodes...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of speculative attacks on pegged exchange rates in 22 countries between 1967 and 1992. We define speculative attacks or crises as large movements in exchange rates, interest rates, and international reserves. We develop stylized facts concerning the...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the medium-term determinants of current accounts for a large sample of industrial and developing countries. The analysis is based on a structural approach that highlights the roles of the fundamental macroeconomic determinants of saving and...

Alexander Swoboda is one of the originators of the bipolar view that capital mobility creates pressure for countries to abandon intermediate exchange rate arrangements in favor of greater flexibility and harder pegs. This paper takes another look at the evidence for this hypothesis using two...

Computer and Internet use, especially in developing countries, has expanded rapidly in recent years. Even in light of this expansion in technology adoption rates, penetration rates differ markedly between developed and developing countries and across developing countries. To identify the...

We investigate the medium-term determinants of the current account using a model that controls for factors related to institutional development, with a goal of informing the recent debate over the existence and relevance of the "savings glut." The economic environmental factors that we consider...

We analyze banking crises using a panel of macroeconomic and financial data for more than one hundred developing countries from 1975 through 1992. We find that banking crises in emerging markets are strongly associated with adverse external conditions. In particular Northern interest rates are...

This paper studies the effect of foreign aid on economic stabilization. Following Alesina and Drazen (1991), we model the delay in stabilizing as the result of a distributional struggle: reforms are postponed because they are costly and each distributional faction hopes to reduce its share of...

We study how the financial conditions in the Center Economies [the U.S., Japan, and the Euro area] impact other countries over the period 1986 through 2015. Our methodology relies upon a two-step approach. We focus on five possible linkages between the center economies (CEs) and the non-Center...

We investigate why and how the financial conditions of developing and emerging market countries (peripheral countries) can be affected by the movements in the center economies - the U.S., Japan, the Eurozone, and China. We apply a two-step approach. First, we estimate the sensitivity of...