The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 crystallized the underlying imbalances that are currently acting to tear apart the Euro area monetary and fiscal systems by focusing markets and public attention on the core cause of the overall Euro crisis, the insolvency of the Euro area member-states...

Sovereign default is the switching state between successful and unsuccessful Fund catalysis. We find the IMF to be effective in mobilising private capital flows to middle-income countries that participate in a Fund program, but do not restructure their debt. A debt restructuring is a clear...

A critical question faced by any sovereign seeking to raise funds in the bond market is whether to issue the debt under foreign or local parameters. This choice determines other key characteristics of any bond issue such as which banks, lawyers, and investors will be involved. Most important...

Recent court rulings effectively barred Argentina from international capital markets until she honored previous sovereign debt contracts. These rulings have been criticized by some in the legal community for possibly harming New York's standing as a preeminent capital market and hindering...

IMF programs are often considered to carry a “stigma” that triggers adverse market reactions. We show that such a negative IMF effect disappears when accounting for endogenous selection into programs. To proxy for a country's access to financial markets, we use credit ratings and investor...

Historically, sovereign debt in local currency has been considered safer than debt in foreign currency. Yet the literature offers scant theoretical or empirical guidance as to why such a gap exists, or why it appears to have slowly and steadily diminished for all regions over the past two...

IMF programs are often considered to carry a "stigma" that triggers adverse market reactions. We show that such a negative IMF effect disappears when accounting for endogenous selection into programs. To proxy for a country's access to financial markets, we use credit ratings and investor...

We lay out the IMF's rationale for its role in the international economy; particularly in helping those countries that are going through balance of payments crises. We then try to decipher whether the actual lending pattern of the IMF conforms to this rationale. This is done in the context of...

We examine whether changes in sovereign credit ratings assessments provided by rating agencies help to determine international bank flows to emerging countries. We focus on the quarterly banking flows of G7 countries to a sample of 55 emerging market borrowers for the period 1995-2008. We find...

This paper studies the behavior of sovereign spreads of countries in the European Monetary Union (EMU) and their apparent disconnection with country-specific fundamentals before the 2008- 2013 debt crisis. We test three characteristics of spreads: i) a change in the level of spreads, ii) a weak...