Several European countries face challenges reminiscent of those faced by the emerging economies of Latin America. The economic booms in some peripheral Euro-zone countries financed by large capital inflows; the credit and asset price booms and then the busts including Sudden Stops in capital...

Despite the frequency of official debt restructurings, little systematic evidence has been produced on their characteristics and implications. Using a dataset covering more than 400 Paris Club agreements, this paper aims to fill that gap. It provides a comprehensive description of the evolving...

The Chilean system of housing finance is a mixture of public and private elements that has arguably been very successful. This paper provides an up- to-date review of the main instruments, actors, and government policies of the Chilean system of housing finance. It concludes that, while the...

After decades using monetary aggregates as the main instrument of monetary policy and having different varieties of crawling peg exchange rate regimes, Colombia adopted a full-fledged inflation-targeting (IT) regime in 1999, with inflation as the nominal anchor, a floating exchange rate, and the...

Recent work suggests non-financial firms have acted like financial intermediaries particularly in emerging economies. This paper corroborates these findings but then asks "why?". The results indicate evidence for carry-trade activities, but they are focused on countries with higher levels of...

We study the relationship between corporate debt, corporate risk and firm-level investment, using a sample of 25,000 listed companies across 47 countries over the last two decades. We find higher leverage reduces investment but show the effect varies with risk, as measured by firm time-varying...

We assess the quantitative relevance of expectations-driven sovereign debt crises, focusing on the Southern European crisis of the early 2010s and the Argentine default of 2001. The source of multiplicity is the one in Calvo (1988). Key for multiplicity is an output process featuring long...

Using a large panel of official bilateral loan data for 111 borrowing countries and 78 lending countries between 1980 and 2020, this paper shows that international government borrowing from bilateral sources is acyclical with respect to the economic cycle of the borrower, but procyclical with...

This paper studies the effect of fiscal rules on debt affordability in a large set of developed and emerging market economies, using a panel data model which allows the inclusion of weakly exogenous regressors, and which deals appropriately with cross-sectional dependence. The results show a...

We explore how Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) can help to fill a large infrastructure financing gap in developing countries by indirectly mobilizing resources from other entities. The analysis focuses on more than 6,500 transactions in 2005-2020 to developing and emerging markets from the...