Economic Citizenship Programs (ECPs) have recently been proliferating, with large and potentially volatile inflows of investment and fiscal revenues generating significant benefits for small economies, but also posing substantial challenges. This paper discusses recent developments and...

The paper analyzes and quantifies the importance of sovereign risk in determining corporate default premia (yield spreads). It also investigates the extent to which the practice by rating agencies and banks of not rating companies higher than their sovereign (""country or sovereign ceiling"") is...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

This paper examines how capital controls affect FDI decisions and how the impact of these restrictive measures varies with different levels of country risk. We construct a model of firms'' FDI decisions, broadly in Dunning''s ""eclectic theory"" framework, using ""real options"" to emphasize...

How do oil price movements affect sovereign spreads in an oil-dependent economy? I develop a stochastic general equilibrium model of an economy exposed to co-moving oil price and output processes, with endogenous sovereign default risk. The model explains a large proportion of business cycle...

This paper computes the default probabilities implicit in the prices of Brady bonds of seven developing countries and examines the factors that determine the high cross-correlation of the probability paths. The term structure of U.S. interest rates and the ratio of long-term foreign debt to GDP,...

This paper develops a simple real options model that demonstrates the role of country-specific risk and sunk costs in determining a multinational’s choice between exports and foreign investment. The hypotheses from the model are tested for the distribution of capital expenditures by U.S.-owned...