Remarks at the Foreign Policy Association Corporate Dinner, New York City

Remarks at the Foreign Policy Association Corporate Dinner, New York City

Economist Nathan Sheets, director of the Federal Reserve Board's Division of International Finance, puts a global perspective on the current economic crisis and the Fed's response to it.

This paper seeks to draw lessons from the IMF’s experience in handling financial crises around the globe over the past ten years that are relevant to the challenges faced by countries in Latin America, especially in the wake of the recent crisis in Argentina. Experience suggests that...

This paper addresses the challenges to prudential supervision in highly dollarized economies, where central banks and supervisors may be constrained in the use of standard money and financial policy tools. The study’s conclusions are the basis of an ongoing policy dialogue with IMF member...

The study documents evidence of a "quality effect" of financial liberalization on allocative efficiency, which is measured by the dispersion in Tobin's Q across firms. Based on a simple model, the authors predict that financial liberalization, by equalizing access to credit, reduces the...

Does country "transparency" affect international portfolio investment? We examine this and related questions using a unique micro dataset on international portfolio holdings. We employ various indices of government and corporate transparency, focusing on the availability and quality of...

Despite stops, gaps, and reversals, financial reforms advanced worldwide in the last quarter century. Using a new index of financial liberalization, we conclude that influential events shook the status quo, inducing both reforms and reversals, while learning, more so than ideology and country...

Volatility in Italian sovereign spreads has increased since mid-2011. This paper finds that news on the euro area debt crisis and country specific events were important drivers of sovereign spreads. Movements in sovereign spreads affect CDS spreads and bond yields of Italian banks, and are...

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to model the components of credit risk in primary debt markets and evaluate changes in these factors in times of crisis. Design/methodology/approach - The authors use a unique dataset consisting of nearly 163,000 new loans and bond issues in the USA and...