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...

This paper examines the direct private equity investment strategies across sovereign wealth funds and their relationship to the funds' organizational structures. SWFs seem to engage in a form of trend chasing, since they are more likely to invest at home when domestic equity prices are higher,...

While empirical literature has documented a negative relation between default risk and stock returns, the theory suggests that default risk should be positively priced. We provide an explanation for this "default anomaly", by calculating monthly probabilities of default (PDs) for a large sample...

The more severe a financial crisis, the greater has been the likelihood of its management under an IMF-supported programme and the shorter the time from crisis onset to programme initiation. Political links to the United States have increased programme likelihood but have prompted faster...

This paper studies the effect of implementing fiscal rules on sovereign default risk and on the probability of large capital ow reversals for a large sample of countries including both developed and emerging market economies. Results indicate that fiscal rules are beneficial for macroeconomic...

Leading into a debt crisis, interest rate spreads on sovereign debt rise before the economy experiences a decline in productivity, suggesting that news about future economic developments may play an important role in these episodes. In a VAR estimation, a news shock has a larger contemporaneous...

The wave of sovereign defaults in the early 1980s and the string of debt crises in the decades that followed have fostered proposals involving policy interventions in sovereign debt restructurings. A key question about these proposals that has proved hard to handle is how they in influence the...

Using dynamic factor models and state-space techniques we quantify financial cycles for twenty European countries over the period 1960Q1–2015Q4 capturing imbalances across credit, housing, bond and equity markets. The paper documents the existence of slow-moving and persistent financial cycles...

This paper assesses the vulnerability of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) economies to external crises. It shows that while the average LAC economy has made significant strides to reduce vulnerability to crises to its historical minimum, there is still considerable room for improvement,...