India’s strong growth and macroeconomic stability is owed to its sound macroeconomic policies and past structural reforms. Swelling capital inflows have highlighted the key policy challenges: managing financial globalization and tackling the supply constraints to growth. Monetary...

How to entrench hard-won gains, increase resilience to shocks, and improve growth performance to reduce poverty? As Central America moves forward in regaining macroeconomic stability, these are the challenges. This study analyzes Central America’s real, fiscal, monetary, and financial...

This paper examines the macroeconomic implications of recent developments in financial engineering, with particular emphasis on the post-1987 growth of markets for securities backed by credit card, installment, student loan, and home equity receivables. Three linkages of financial engineering to...

In a Minskian world, the "moment" occurs after a cumulative process toward financial instability. Minsky argued that during a sustained boom, an upward revision of profit expectations should lead to higher leverage ratios and greater risk taking. In this article, I investigate whether the...

We define a new approach to manage prepayment, default and interest rate risks simultaneously in some standard asset-backed securities structures. We propose a parsimonious top-down approach, by modeling directly the portfolio loss process and the amortization process. Both are correlated to...

In recent years, one area of growing concern in corporate governance is the accounting and transfer of risk using special purpose entities (or trusts). Such entities are used widely in issuing asset-backed securities. This paper provides an overview of the asset-backed securities market, and...

The January 2009 federal budget proposed funding a “Canadian Secured Credit Facility” as part of an economic action plan. This Facility will allocate up to $12 billion to purchases of term asset-backed securities (ABS) for loans and leases on vehicles and equipment. The Facility will be...