This paper analyzes the behavior of current account deficits in Africa and estimates whether the deficits are excessive with respect to fundamentals. The findings are that deficits are (i) not very persistent; (ii) positively linked with domestic growth; (iii) strongly linked with public (and...

Policymakers across countries have been seeking to strengthen the institutional framework to control fiscal costs and feedback effects to the real economy generated by bank failures. On a cross-section of countries, we find evidence that suggests that bank supervisors’ intervention in bank...

We study the link between the probability of default implied by Credit Default Swaps (CDS) spreads and the final prices of the defaulted bonds as established at the CDS settlement auctions. We observe that the post-default recovery rates at the observed spreads imply markets were often...