Financial crises affect income distribution by way of different channels. The authors argue that financial transfers are an important channel which has been overlooked by the literature. They study the role of financial transfers by analyzing some of the most severe Latin American crises during...

Inherent in pursuing openness to international capital flows is an awareness that it brings both benefits and risks. Much of the current debate is about how best to balance them. Major benefits for developing countries include access to a broader menu of investment sources, options, and...

The authors investigate the origins of the East Asian crisis and its contagion, examine the channels of contagion, and discuss policy recommendationsThey make detailed recommendations in the context of nine general lessons learned from the East Asian crisis. 1) Preventing crises and contagion:...

The authors investigate whether resident enterprise managers have an informational advantage about the countries in which they work. They propose a method for extracting information available to resident managers but unknown to investors and forecasters. They rest their hypothesis of...

The authors address the trading strategies of mutual funds in emerging markets. The data set they develop permits analyses of these strategies at the level of individual portfolios. A methodologically novel feature of their analysis: they disentangle the behavior of fund managers from that of...

The emergence in the 1990s of a nascent project bond market to fund long-term infrastructure projects in developing countries merits attention. The authors compile detailed information on a sample of 105 bonds issued between January 1993 and March 2002 for financing infrastructure projects in...

Financial market instability has been the focus of attention of both academic and policy circles. Rating agencies have been under particular scrutiny lately as promoters of financial excesses, upgrading countries in good times and downgrading them in bad times. Using a panel of emerging...

Most people agree that the soundness of macroeconomic policies should be judged by their efficacy in meeting the objectives of steady growth, full employment, stable prices, and a viable external payments situation. What people debate about are the links between macroeconomics and economic...

Risk shifting and incomplete contracting lie at the heart of the agency relationship inherent in the procurement and financing of large-scale projects such as power plants, oil and gas pipelines, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities. Resolving this agency problem is critical in structuring...

The authors offer evidence that U.S. interest rate policy has an important influence in the determination of credit spreads on emerging market bonds over U.S. benchmark treasuries and therefore on their cost of capital. Their analysis improves on the existing literature and understanding by...