Emerging market economies are fertile ground for the development of real estate and other financial bubbles. Despite these economies' significant growth potential, their corporate and government sectors do not generate the financial instruments to provide residents with adequate stores of value....

The U.S. is currently engulfed in the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. A key structural factor behind this crisis is the large demand for riskless assets from the rest of the world. In this paper we present a model to show how such demand not only triggered a sharp rise...

Even well managed emerging market economies are exposed to significant external risk, the bulk of which is financial. At a moment's notice, these economies may be required to reverse the capital inflows that have supported the preceding boom. While capital flows crises are sudden nonlinear...

Although internal policy mismanagements can be cited in most recent emerging market crises, they seldom account fully for the severity of these crises. The reluctance of international investors to provide the resources that would limit the extent of the reversal almost invariably plays a key...

Emerging economies experience sudden stops in capital inflows. As we have argued in Caballero and Krishnamurthy (2002), having access to monetary policy during these sudden stops is useful, but mostly for insurance' rather than for aggregate demand reasons. In this environment, a central bank...

Latin American economies are exposed to substantial external vulnerability. Domestic imbalances and terms of trade shocks are often exacerbated by sudden stops of capital inflow. In this paper we explore ways of overcoming external vulnerability, drawing lessons from a detailed comparison of the...

We model sudden stops in a small open economy as rare discrete events precipitated by increases in the world risk-free rate. When external debt is large, the model exhibits multiple equilibria, one where external debt and consumption remain high, and one with a collapse in external debt and...

One of the main economic villains before the crisis was the presence of large "global imbalances." The concern was that the U.S. would experience a sudden stop of capital flows, which would unavoidably drag the world economy into a deep recession. However, when the crisis finally did come, the...