The Baring Crisis is the nineteenth century's most famous sovereign debt crisis. Few studies, however, have attempted to understand the extent to which the crisis mattered for countries other than Argentina and England. Using a new database consisting of more than 15,000 observations of weekly...

To study the joint decision of holding sovereign debt and reserves, we construct a stochastic dynamic equilibrium model that incorporates willingness-to-pay incentive problems. In this setup, debt and assets are not perfect substitutes, as reserves can be used even after a country has defaulted....

This paper examines South Korea's macroeconomic performance and experience with external debt during 1960-1986. Most of Korea's debt was accumulated during three periods: 1966-69, 1974-75 and 1979-81. Each involved an initial phase of economic difficulty and an slow-down in growth, followed by...

This paper deals with Latin America's experience with capital flows during the last decade and a half. It concentrates on a number of issues of increasing interest among academics and international observers, including the effect of capital inflows on domestic savings, the way in which capital...

A number of developing countries have run large and persistent current account deficits in both the late seventies/early eighties and in the early nineties, raising the issue of whether these persistent imbalances are sustainable. This paper puts forward a notion of current account...

We analyze how a country's political institutions affect oil production within its borders. We find a pronounced negative relationship between political openness and volatility in oil production, with democratic regimes exhibiting less volatility than more autocratic regimes. This relationship...

The price of crude oil in the U.S. never exceeded $40 per barrel until mid-2004. By 2006 it reached$70, and in July 2008 it peaked at $145. By late 2008 it had plummeted to about $30 before increasingto $110 in 2011. Are speculators at least partly to blame for these sharp price changes? We...

This paper surveys the history of the oil industry with a particular focus on the events associated with significant changes in the price of oil. Although oil was used much differently and was substantially less important economically in the nineteenth century than it is today, there are...

We use a new micro data set that covers all oil fields in the world to estimate a stochastic industry-equilibrium model of the oil industry with two alternative market structures. In the first, all firms are competitive. In the second, OPEC firms act as a cartel. This effort is a first step...

This paper examines the factors responsible for changes in crude oil prices. The paper reviews the statistical behavior of oil prices, relates these to the predictions of theory, and looks in detail at key features of petroleum demand and supply. Topics discussed include the role of commodity...