This paper shows that recent manifestations of sudden stops (SSs) in international capital flows have striking parallels in the early financial globalization era preceding World War I. All main capital-importing countries then faced episodic capital flow reversals averaging some 5 percent of GDP...

This paper looks at the dramatic decline in global real interest rates in recent years from a historical perspective and examines the various factors that may account for this trend. We show that current levels of real interest rates on long-term bonds in advanced economies are not low by...

The large swings in world food prices in recent years renew interest in the question of how monetary policy in small open economies should react to such imported price shocks. We examine this issue in a canonical open economy setting with sticky prices and where food plays a distinctive role in...

This paper revisits the relative importance of global versus country-specific factors underlying stock returns. It constructs a new firm level data set covering emerging and developed markets and estimates a simple factor model, which breaks down stock returns into a global business cycle...

While the relationship between volatility and credit risk is central to much of the literature on finance and banking, it has been largely neglected in empirical macro studies on sovereign defaults. This paper presents new econometric estimates for a panel of 25 emerging market countries over...

The External Balance Assessment (EBA) methodology has been developed by the IMF’s Research Department as a successor to the CGER methodology for assessing current accounts and exchange rates in a multilaterally consistent manner. Compared to other approaches, EBA emphasizes distinguishing...

How should monetary policy respond to large fluctuations in world food prices? We study this question in an open economy model in which imported food has a larger weight in domestic consumption than abroad and international risk sharing can be imperfect. A key novelty is that the real exchange...

We examine the determinants of external crises, focusing on the role of foreign liabilities and their composition. Using a variety of statistical tools and comprehensive data spanning 1970-2011, we find that the ratio of net foreign liabilities (NFL) to GDP is a significant crisis predictor, and...