The timing is ripe to pursue greater regional financial integration in Latin America given the withdrawal of some global banks from the region and the weakening of growth prospects. Important initiatives are ongoing to foster financial integration. Failure to capitalize on this would represent a...

Net capital flows to emerging Asia rebounded at a record pace following the global financial crisis, raising concerns about overheating and financial stability. This paper documents the size and composition of the most recent surge to Asian emerging markets from a historical perspective and...

The recent crises highlighted the role of cross-border banking linkages. This paper proposes two new measures for better capturing creditor banking systems' foreign credit exposures and borrower countries' reliance on foreign bank credit, by combining BIS data with bank-level data. The results...

We analyse euro area investors' portfolio rebalancing during the ECB's Asset Purchase Programme at the security level. Our empirical analysis shows that euro area investors (in particular investment funds and households) actively rebalanced away from securities targeted under the Public Sector...

Benchmark following and portfolio rebalancing effects have often been cited when trying to explain international contagion phenomena. Using a dataset containing the country allocation of individual dedicated emerging market equity funds, we assess the relevance of mean-variance optimization and...

The expansion of the global mutual fund industry has been represented by both, its growth in mature as well as in emerging markets. This has clearly contributed to the development of local securities markets in emerging economies, which in turn, has been key in attracting investment inflows from...

The paper analyzes and quantifies the importance of sovereign risk in determining corporate default premia (yield spreads). It also investigates the extent to which the practice by rating agencies and banks of not rating companies higher than their sovereign (quot;country or sovereign...

Do the dynamics of net flows to U.S. retail mutual funds affect equity returns in emerging markets? The question merits further examination since retail investors in mutual funds can exert a much greater degree of 'control' over these funds via cash injections or redemptions at any time. A VAR...

The assessment of external positions and exchange rates is a key mandate of the IMF. This paperpresents the updated External Balance Assessment (EBA) framework-a key input in the conduct ofmultilaterally-consistent external sector assessments of 49 advanced and emerging marketeconomies-following...

We use loan-level data on syndicated lending to a large sample of developing countries between 1993and 2017 to estimate the mobilization effects of multilateral development banks (MDBs), controllingfor a large set of fixed effects. We find evidence of positive and significant direct and...