Since the onset of the global financial crisis, China and the U.S. have reduced their current-account imbalances as a share of GDP to less than half their pre-crisis levels. For China, the reduction in its current-account surplus post-crisis suggests a structural change. Panel regressions for a...

We empirically assess the relative importance of various economic fundamentals in accounting for the sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads of emerging markets during 2004-2012, which encompasses the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. Inflation, state fragility, external debt, and...

We define the notion of a 'de facto fiscal space' of a country as the inverse of the tax-years it would take to repay the public debt. Specifically, we measure the outstanding public debt relative to the de facto tax base, where the latter measures the realized tax collection, averaged across...

We investigate the relationship between economic growth and lagged international capital flows, disaggregated into FDI, portfolio investment, equity investment, and short-term debt. We follow about 100 countries during 1990-2010 when emerging markets became more integrated into the international...

This paper studies the cross-country variation of the fiscal stimulus and the exchange rate adjustment propagated by the global crisis of 2008-9, identifying the role of economic structure in accounting for the heterogeneity of response. We find that greater de facto fiscal space prior to the...

We estimate the pricing of sovereign risk for sixty countries based on fiscal space (debt/tax; deficits/tax) and other economic fundamentals over 2005-10. We measure how accurately the model predicts sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads, focusing in particular on the five countries in the...

This paper investigates the association between greater income inequality, de-facto fiscal space, and sovereign spreads. Using data from 50 countries in 2007, 2009 and 2011, we find that higher income inequality is associated with a lower tax base, lower de-facto fiscal space, and higher...

The global crisis highlights the continued vulnerability of developing countries to shocks from advanced economies. Just a few years after the global crisis, the eurozone sovereign debt crisis has emerged as the single biggest threat to the global outlook. In this paper, we apply the event study...

Key factors in modeling a pandemic and guiding policy-making include mortality rates associated with infections; the ability of government policies, medical systems, and society to adapt to the changing dynamics of a pandemic; and institutional and demographic characteristics affecting citizens'...

The pronounced and persistent impact of the global financial crisis of 2008 motivates our empirical analysis of the role of institutions and macroeconomic fundamentals on countries' adjustment to shocks. Our empirical analysis shows that the associations of growth level, growth volatility,...