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...

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...

We study how political constraints, characterized by the degree of flexibility to choose fiscal policy, affect the probability of sovereign default. To that end, we relax the assumption that policymakers always repay their debt in the dynamic model of fiscal policy developed by Battaglini and...

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....

We present and test an explanation for lags in the adjustment of wholesale gasoline prices to changes in crude oil prices. Our simple model with costly adjustment of production and inventories implies that output prices will respond with a lag to cost shocks even in the absence of menu costs,...

This paper examines the effect of OPEC price increases on the welfare of a group of oil-importing industrial countries. It also studies how taxes or subsidies on oil imports or capital flows could alter the group's welfare. The analysis is conducted using a general-equilibrium model that...

For oil importers, differences in economic performance after the 1973-74 oil price increase and after the 1979-80 increase can be attributed to a number of factors, including the fact that the 1973-74 oil price increase was unexpected whereas the 1979-80 increase was largely expected. In this...

This paper explores the connections between the shift of world saving toward OPEC and the changing structure of U.S. trade with the non-oil developing countries. The basic point of the paper is that during the 1970s the U.S. economy has become more interdependent through trade with the newly...