The paper starts from the premise that the debate on the ‘new architecture’ of the international financial system should be based on a theory that endogenizes the structure of countries' external liabilities. I present a model in which the maturity of a country's external sovereign debt is...

A Tobin tax (TT) is studied by means of a portfolio model defined over the means and variances of two rates of return (domestic and foreign). When the correlation is negative, the TT is likely to decrease the speculative component of the share of portfolio invested abroad and to increase the...

The increased mobility of capital of the last few decades creates new challenges for the macroeconomic policies of the nation-states. In this paper we analyse some of these challenges. Contrary to what is often alleged, increased capital mobility does not necessarily increase the need for...

We study how investor behavior affects the transmission of financial crises. If investors exhibit decreasing relative risk aversion, then negative wealth shocks increase the risk premium required to hold risky assets. We integrate this into a second generation model of currency crises which...

This paper proposes a model encompassing alternative views of contagion by highlighting the different channels of transmission of financial crises in an unifying framework. We study investor behaviour when they are affected by external habit formation. It is shown how international portfolio...

This paper investigates the spread of what started as a crisis at the core of the global financial system to emerging economies. While emerging economies had exhibited some resilience through the early stages of the financial turmoil that began in the summer of 2007, they have been hit hard...

In this note we summarize our recent paper, where we delved into the details of this apple-to-oranges problem with the aim of defining a minimum common ground. We begin our analysis by explicitly documenting the kinds of measures that are construed as capital controls. Along the way, we describe...

In 2010 and 2011, there has been a fresh wave of interest in cap- ital controls. India is one of the few large countries with a complex system of capital controls, and hence offers an opportunity to assess the extent to which these help achieve goals of macroeconomic and fi- nancial policy. We...

Currency market intervention-cum-reserve accumulation has emerged as the favored "self-insurance" strategy in recipient countries of excessive private capital inflows. This paper argues that capital account management represents a less costly alternative line of defense deserving renewed...

This paper reviews some of the current debates on the reform of the international monetary system. Despite its deficiencies, the United States (US) dollar will remain the dominant currency and Special Drawing Rights (SDR) cannot serve as either an international medium of exchange or a reserve...