This Chartbook, which is a companion piece to Carmen M. Reinhart and Takeshi Tashiro (2013) "Crowding Out Redefined: The Role of Reserve Accumulation," focuses on nine Asian economies: China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Like its predecessor...

This paper presents and applies an integrated framework to assess the consistency between fiscal deficits and other macroeconomic targets, such as output growth and the rate of inflation. The model centers around the government budget constraint and can be used to either derive the financeable...

Do external imbalances increase the risk of financial crises? In this paper, we study the experience of 14 developed countries over 140 years (1870-2008). We exploit our long-run dataset in a number of different ways. First, we apply new statistical tools to describe the temporal and spatial...

This paper compares the equilibrium dynamics of an economy facing an aggregate collateral constraint on external debt to the dynamics of an economy facing a collateral constraint imposed at the level of each individual agent. The aggregate collateral constraint is intended to capture an...

Over 60% of US households with credit cards are currently borrowing -- i.e., paying interest -- on those cards. We attempt to reconcile the high rate of credit card borrowing with observed levels of life cycle wealth accumulation. We simulate a lifecycle model with five properties that create...

Recent years have seen the development of a large literature on balance sheet factors in emerging-market financial crises. In this paper we discuss three concepts widely used in this literature. Two of them original sin' and debt intolerance' seek to explain the same phenomenon, namely, the...

What difference does it make, and for whom, whether the nonperforming debts of emerging market borrowers are restructured? This paper begins by positing a set of counterfactual conditions under which restructuring would not matter, and then shows how several ways in which the actual world of...

A model of financial crises in emerging markets based on problems of agency in financial intermediation is developed. This model generates dynamic relationships between foreign capital inflows, domestic investment and domestic bank debt in an endogenous growth model. As a consequence of loan...

This paper provides updated estimates of the impact of three financial frictions - negative equity, mortgage lock-in, and property tax lock-in - on household mobility. We add the 2009 wave of the American Housing Survey (AHS) to our sample and also create an improved measure of permanent moves...

We study a period of severe disequilibrium to investigate whether board characteristics are related to corporate investment, debt usage, and firm value. During the 1930-1938 Depression era, when the corporate sector was shocked by an unprecedented downturn, we document a relation between board...