This paper documents a new type of cross-border bank lending channel. The deepening of the European sovereign debt crisis in 2011 restrained the financial intermediation of European banks in the United States. In this period, some of the U.S. branches of European banks faced a dollar liquidity...

This paper documents a new type of cross-border bank lending channel using a novel dataset on the balance sheets of U.S. branches of foreign banks and their syndicated loans. We show that: (1) The U.S. branches of euro-area banks suffered a liquidity shock in the form of reduced access to large...

Emerging economies, unlike advanced economies, have accumulated large foreign reserve holdings. We argue that this policy is an optimal response to an increase in foreign debt rollover risk. In our model, reserves play a key role in reducing debt rollover crises (“sudden stops”), akin to the...

In this paper I explore the role of portfolio diversification in explaining the distribution of foreign investment across countries. I capture the portfolio diversification motive by a measure of country-specific riskiness, “covariance risk,” which I construct as how countries' growth rates...

We analyze the impact of monetary policy on bilateral cross-border bank flows using the BIS Locational Banking Statistics between 1995 and 2014. We find that monetary policy in the source countries is an important determinant of cross-border bank flows. In addition, we find evidence in favor of...

I investigate how natural disaster can exacerbate fiscal vulnerabilities and trigger sovereign defaults. I extend a standard sovereign default model to include disaster risk and calibrate it to a sample of seven Caribbean countries that are frequently hit by hurricanes. I find that hurricane...

Emerging market interest rate spreads display substantial time-varying volatility. We show that a baseline model with endogenous sovereign default risk can account for such volatility, even in the absence of shocks to the second moments of the exogenous stochastic variables. In particular, the...

This paper builds a model of sovereign debt in which default risk, interest rates, and debt depend not only on current fundamentals but also on news about future fundamentals. News shocks affect equilibrium outcomes because they contain information about the future ability of the government to...

Estimates of U.S. returns differentials have ranged from exorbitant to quite small, in part because of their volatility coupled with the relatively short time series available. We shed light on underlying drivers of returns differentials by presenting a number of decompositions: a by-asset-class...