Most emerging markets do not borrow much internationally in their own currency, although doing that has been argued as an attractive insurance mechanism. This phenomenon, commonly labeled"the original sin", has mostly been interpreted as evidence of the countries'inability to borrow in domestic...

The economy of Moldova, which has one of the lowest levels of gross national income per capita in the World Bank Europe and Central Asia region, is strongly linked to the outside world, especially to the neighboring countries of the European Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States. This...

In the past two decades, cross-border portfolio holdings of a large variety of assets have risen sharply. This has created an important role for changes in asset prices of a country's external assets and liabilities (i.e."valuation effects") in affecting the country's net foreign asset position....

The 2007 subprime crisis in the United States has triggered a succession of financial crises around the globe, reigniting interest in the contagion phenomenon. Not all crises, however, are contagious. This paper models a new channel of contagion where the degree of anticipation of crises,...

Risk and its consequences pose a formidable threat to poverty reduction efforts. This study reviews a plethora of community-based risk management arrangements across the developing world. These types of arrangements are garnering greater interest in light of the growing recognition of the...

There is an ongoing debate on whether disasters cause significant macroeconomic impacts and are truly a potential impediment to economic development. This paper aims to assess whether and by what mechanisms disasters have the potential to cause significant GDP impacts. The analysis first studies...

This paper shows how Dutch disease effects may arise solely from a shift in demand following a natural resource discovery. The natural resource wealth increases the demand for non-tradable luxury services due to non-homothetic preferences. Labor that could be used to develop other non-resource...

This paper explores the impact of structural reforms on a comprehensive set of macro-level labor-market outcomes, including the unemployment rate, the average wage index, and overall and female employment levels and labor force participation rates. Together these outcome variables capture the...

Do export promotion agencies impact the probability of non-exporting firms to export? In the last decade many countries have introduced export promotion agencies to support their firms to deal with asymmetric information problems and make feasible additional gains from trade. Some recent studies...

The"tapering talk"starting on May 22, 2013, when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke first spoke of the possibility of the U.S. central bank reducing its security purchases, had a sharp negative impact on emerging markets. India was among those hardest hit. The rupee depreciated by 18 percent...