Public and private sector balance sheets are an important component to any analysis of debt sustainability. A vulnerable and indebted private sector can become a sudden liability for the government; alternatively, resilient household and bank balance sheets may reveal potential sources of...

This paper proposes an approach to track US$1 trillion of emerging market government debt held by foreign investors in local and hard currency, based on a similar approach that was used for advanced economies (Arslanalp and Tsuda, 2012). The estimates are constructed on a quarterly basis from...

Asia proved to be remarkably resilient in the face of the global financial crisis, but why was its output performance stronger than that of other regions? The paper shows that better initial conditions—in the form of lower external and financial vulnerabilities—contributed significantly to...

We create a network of bilateral correlations of changes in sovereign bond yields and individual bank equity price changes since 2000. We extract some stylized facts from this network of asset price correlations and document the clear differences in asset price correlations between safe havens...

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and nowhere is this truer than in the arena of international economic policy cooperation. With the world facing the largest and most synchronized plunge in output of the postwar era, policy makers banded together to find solutions. This paper looks at the...

This paper has two objectives. First, it reviews the recent dynamics of global imbalances (both “flow” and “stock” imbalances), with a special focus on the shifting position of Latin America in the global distribution. Second, it examines the cross-country variation in external...

This paper describes the anatomy of two types of balance-sheet macroeconomic crises. Conventional balance-sheet crises are triggered by external imbalances and balance sheet vulnerabilities. They typically occur after capital inflows have led to a substantial build up of foreign currency...

Abstract What do climate change, global financial crises, pandemics, and fragility and conflict have in common? They are all examples of global risks that can cross geographical and generational boundaries and whose mismanagement can reverse gains in development and jeopardize the well-being of...

Although cross-border bank lending has fallen sharply since the crisis, extending our bank ownership database from 1995-2009 up to 2013 shows only limited retrenchment in foreign bank presence. While banks from OECD countries reduced their foreign presence (but still represent 89% of foreign...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the issue of how best to identify speculative asset bubbles (in real-time) remains in flux. This owes to the difficulty of disentangling irrational investor exuberance from the rational response to lower risk based on price behavior alone. In...