When a bank experiences a negative shock to its equity, one way to return to target leverage is to sell assets. If asset sales occur at depressed prices, then one bank's sales may impact other banks with common exposures, resulting in contagion. We propose a simple framework that accounts for...

Conventional wisdom holds that lack of government commitment deters foreign investment in developing countries. Yet this explanation is not convincing because some econometric studies have found little support for the role of political risk and host governments can offer upfront subsidies that...

A financial crisis with a capital flow reversal occurs when a country shifts abruptly from a 'good' equilibrium with a low country-specific risk premium to a 'bad' equilibrium with a high country-specific risk premium and no foreign credit

This paper examines how increased uncertainty about an emerging market's international reserves affects the willingness of foreign investors to supply international credits. We illustrate the relevance of this concern for South Korea during the recent financial crisis. Using available...

This paper characterizes the effects of reserve requirements on financial loans in the presence of moral hazard on the lender side (i.e., the anticipation that the taxpayer will bailout lending banks if large default will occur) and sovereign risk on the borrower side. The impacts of such...

This paper studies the effect of policy uncertainty on the formation of new activities in Romer's (1994) type of an economy, where productivity of labor increases with the number of capital goods. Adding a new capital good requires a capital specific set-up cost, invested prior to using the...

This paper shows that the patterns of optimal tax rates and borrowing in the presence of endogenous borrowing constraints differ considerably from the patterns observed with fully integrated capital markets. We study a developing country characterized by a costly tax collection. Its access to...

We review the literature on sovereign debt. We organize our survey around three central questions: (1) Why do sovereign debtors ever repay their debts? (2) What burdens, in the form of distortions and inefficiencies, does sovereign debt impose? and (3) How might debt be restructured to reduce...

We provide methods of decomposing the variance of world national incomes into components in such a way as to indicate the most important risk-sharing opportunities, and, therefore, the most important missing international risk markets to establish. One method uses a total variance reduction...

A fiscal program that redistributes income from rich to poor individuals indirectly redistributes tax revenues from regions hit by a favorable shock to regions hit by an unfavorable one. Centralized fiscal redistribution has therefore been advocated as a way to insure individuals against...