The global recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting deterioration in many countries’ public finances have increased the risk of sovereign debt crises. Although crisis prevention remains paramount, these developments have made it imperative to re-examine the adequacy of the...

The so-called Troika, consisting of the EU-Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), was supposed to support the member states of the euro area which had been hit hard by a sovereign debt crisis. For that purpose, economic adjustment programs were...

World Pensions Council cofounders Vincent Bazi and M. Nicolas J. Firzli analyse the rise of natural gas as a new asset class for pension and sovereign fund stakeholders in light of the geo-institutional dynamics underpinning asset allocation and investment decisions in an era of macroeconomic...

Cross-border bank lending to emerging markets dropped sharply in the second half of 2011 as the euro area crisis intensified. We use the BIS international banking statistics to identify the key drivers of this decline. Our results indicate that the latest contraction in cross-border bank lending...

A recent line of research deals with the formulation, the justification and the modelling of a crisis triggered by involved economic agents. Modelling financial crises within an asymmetric information environment is argued to be a difficult task since the measurement of adverse selection and/or...

The paper analyses how the IMF brought its experience gained in emerging market sovereign debt crises in the troika’s handling of the euro crisis. We link models of multiple equilibria with the IMF's experience made in Latin American crises in the 2000s. We examine subsequent changes in the...