The interaction between credit frictions, financial innovation, and a switch from optimistic to pessimistic beliefs played a central role in the 2008 financial crisis. This paper develops a quantitative general equilibrium framework in which this interaction drives the financial amplification...

Financial contagion and Sudden Stops of capital inflows experienced in emerging-markets crises may originate in an explosive mix of lack of policy credibility and world capital market imperfections that afflict emerging economies with national currencies. Hence, this paper argues that abandoning...

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) Las fricciones financieras son un elemento central de la mayoría de los modelos que ha propuesto la obra publicada sobre los mercados emergentes para explicar el fenómeno de las paradas repentinas. A la fecha, son pocos los estudios que han procurado...

Enrique Mendoza is Professor of International Economics & Finance at the University of Maryland and Resident Scholar at the International Monetary Fund. He has written extensively on international finance, in particular in emerging economies.

This paper reviews Chilean stabilization policy during the 1990s and argues that, while the merits of Chilean policy should be praised, there are four puzzles in conventional interpretations of the Chilean experience worth studying. First, the policy of targeting indexed interest rates does not...

This paper shows that globalization of securities markets exacerbates the volatility of capital flows by strengthening incentives for herding behavior. This is a prediction of a mean-variance portfolio optimization model with imperfect information, in which investors acquire country-specific...

This paper shows that some key stylized facts of exchange-rate-based stabilization plans can be explained by the uncertain duration of the plans themselves. Uncertain duration is modeled to reflect evidence showing that devaluation probabilities are higher when the plans are introduced and...

Governments in emerging markets often behave like a "tormented insurer" who tries to smooth government outlays given the randomness of public revenues and in a challenging world in which "liability dollarization" requires them to issue debt denominated in hard currencies, or indexed to tradable...

Infrequent but dramatic episodes of outright default on domestic sovereign debt are an important historical fact that remains unexplained. We propose an incomplete-markets, heterogeneous-agents model in which domestic default can be optimal for a utilitarian government that responds to...

Enrique Mendoza is the Presidential Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. His work concentrates on financial crises and fiscal policy, in particular in an international context.