The global financial and economic crisis revealed institutional weaknesses and structural problems of particular Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) countries. The crisis and slowdown that followed had an impact on their relative competitiveness. Financial and economic turbulences of recent years...

This paper proposes a model to study how conditional lending and immediate liquidity provision affect incentives for fiscal adjustment in a country facing the risk of sovereign default. Conditional lending provides explicit incentives for fiscal adjustment but immediate liquidity provision is...

The aim of this paper is to examine whether or not financial liberalization has triggered banking crises in developing countries. We focus in particular on the role of capital inflows as their volatilities threat economic stability. In the empirical model, based on Panel Logit estimation, we use...

The pedestrian narrative about the Greek financial crisis and default is that the country was fiscally mismanaged for a long time and failed to carry out needed structural reforms that could have improved economic growth prospects and enhanced the country’s creditworthiness. Therefore, a...

The European Monetary Union is characterized by a crisis of governance, this has become more evident with the crisis of the euro which has shown the weaknesses of the European institutions and stressed the heterogeneity of member countries. The global financial crisis struck the euro area very...

One solution to the euro crisis as a debt crisis can be found in stimulating economic growth. The Troika has proposed measures to deregulate labor markets in Southern EU countries: a longer working week, relaxation of job dismissal laws, raising the age of retirement. A longer working week for...

A graph representation of the financial relations in a given monetary structure is proposed. It is argued that the graph of debt-liability relations is naturally organized and simplified into a tree structure, around banks and a central bank. Indeed, this optimal graph allows to perform payments...

We model a typical Asian-crisis-economy using dynamic general equilibrium tech-niques. Exchange rates obtain from nontrivial fiat-currencies demands. Sudden stops/bank-panics are possible, and key for evaluating the merits of alternative ex-change rate regimes. Strategic complementarities...

Credit derivatives allow for buying protection on corporate debt, but also on sovereign debt. In this paper we examine the implications for sovereign debt crises. We show that the availability of credit protection lowers ex-ante debtor moral hazard by allowing a bondholder to improve his...

Speaking before the IDB Board of Directors, Carmen Reinhart discussed the syndrome of “debt intolerance,” whereby countries with weak institutional structures and problematic political systems borrow in order to avoid difficult fiscal decisions but subsequently find themselves unwilling or...