Using a new daily index of social unrest, we provide systematic evidence on the negative impact of social unrest on stock market performance. An average social unrest episode in an typical country causes a 1.4 percentage point drop in cumulative abnormal returns over a two-week event window....

We provide a theory of the limits to monetary policy independence in open economies arising from the interaction between capital flows and domestic collateral constraints. The key feature of our theory is the existence of an 'Expansionary Lower Bound' (ELB), defined as an interest rate threshold...

Recent interest in futures contracts on emerging market currencies has raised concerns among some central bank authorities about their ability to maintain stable currencies. This paper presents empirical results examining the influence of the Mexican peso, the Brazilian real, and the Hungarian...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the welfare gains from financial integration for developing and emerging market economies. To do so, we build a stochastic endogenous growth model for a small open economy that can (i) borrow from the rest of the world, (ii) invest in foreign assets, and...

The entire difference between a mild downturn and a devastating crisis is the occurrence of sharp fire sales of domestic assets and possibly foreign exchange and the ensuing collapse in the balance sheets of both the financial and nonfinancial sector. Why and how do such crises materialize? And...

This paper develops a stylized, small, open economy macro model that incorporates an explicit and non-trivial role for financial intermediation. It illustrates how such a model could be used for policy analysis in an emerging market economy where policymakers are concerned about risks associated...

This paper examines the effect of international trade on corporate market power in emerging market economies and developing countries, with a special focus on sub-Saharan Africa. The analysis is based on a large firm-level dataset, tariff data by sector and agreggate indicators of international...

This paper borrows the tradition of estimating policy reaction functions from monetary policy literature to ask whether capital controls respond to macroprudential or mercantilist motivations. I explore this question using a novel, weekly dataset on capital control actions in 21 emerging...