The paper shows that international government borrowing from multilateral development banks is countercyclical while international government borrowing form private sector lenders is procyclical. The countercyclicality of official lending is mostly driven by the behavior of the World Bank...

This paper studies the role of global and regional variations in economic activity and policy in developed world in driving portfolio capital flows (PCF) to emerging markets (EMs) in a Factor Augmented Vector Autoregressive (FAVAR) framework. Results suggest that PCFs to EMs depend mainly on...

Sunanda Sen offers an analysis of the ongoing malaise in the world economy, which include the financial and real instability as well as economic recession and lack of development. Rejecting the explanations advanced by the orthodoxy, she deplores the retrograde steps in the interest of high...

We present a standard model of financial innovation, in which intermediaries engineer securities with cash flows that investors seek, but modify two assumptions. First, investors (and possibly intermediaries) neglect certain unlikely risks. Second, investors demand securities with safe cash...