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...

A striking feature of sovereign lending is that many countries with moderate debt-to-income ratios systematically face higher spreads and more stringent borrowing constraints than others with far higher debt ratios. Earlier research has rationalized the phenomenon in terms of sovereign...

We re-assess the view that sovereigns with a history of default are charged only a small and/or short-lived premium on the interest rate warranted by observed fundamentals. Our reassessment uses a metric of such a 'default premium' (DP) that is consistent with asymmetric information models and...

We re-appraise the cross-country evidence on the dollarization of financial systems in emerging market economies. Amidst striking heterogeneity of patterns across regions, we identify a broad global trend towards financial sector de-dollarization from the early 2000s to the eve of the global...

Empirical studies have had little success in finding a statistically significant relationship between fiscal deficits and inflation in broad cross-country panels. This paper provides new econometric estimates for a panel of 23 emerging market countries during 1970-2000. Unlike previous studies,...

Dollarization in financial intermediation has exhibited a widely diverse pattern across countries. Empirical work relating it to macroeconomic variables has had only limited success in explaining the phenomenon. This paper presents a two-currency banking model to show that deposit and loan...

This paper analyzes the informational efficiency of OTC currency options on the Czech koruna and the Polish zloty correcting for the volatility risk premium and errors-in-variable problems, using state-of-the-art techniques (Chernov 2001). It finds that these markets are more efficient than...

This paper examines the propagation of monetary shocks in a two-good optimizing macromodel where domestic banking activity is costly and the non-tradable sector is highly dependent on domestic bank credit, as in most emerging market economies. The model develops the Bernanke-Blinder “credit...

We measure bank vulnerability in emerging markets using the distance-to-default, a risk-neutral indicator based on Merton''s (1974) structural model of credit risk. The indicator is estimated using equity prices and balance-sheet data for 38 banks in 14 emerging market countries. Results show it...

This paper examines equilibrium price relationships and price discovery between credit defaul swap (CDS), bond, and equity markets for emerging market sovereign issuers. Findings suggest that CDS and bond spreads converge despite various pressures that arise in the market. In most countries,...