We argue that, through its effect on aggregate demand and country risk premia, sovereign debt restructuring can adversely affect the private sector's access to foreign capital markets. Using fixed effect analysis, we estimate that sovereign debt rescheduling episodes are indeed systematically...

Emerging countries in many cases are more crisis-prone than highly developed industrialized countries. This is in many cases due to a weak or volatile financial sector. The best policy to strengthen crisis resistance is the building up of a sound financial position. A sound financial position of...

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged global economies with unparalleled negative shock. Asia and Latin America have gone through a number of financial crises in the last few decades but they have addressed those crises rather differently, leading to different growth trajectories after the...

Most models currently used to determine optimal foreign reserve holdings take the level of international debt as given. However, given the sovereign's willingness-to-pay incentive problems, reserve accumulation may reduce sustainable debt levels. In addition, assuming constant debt levels does...

We examine the short- and long-run effects of financial liberalization on capital markets. To do so, we construct a new comprehensive chronology of financial liberalization in 28 mature and emerging market economies since 1973. We also construct an algorithm to identify booms and busts in stock...

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged global economies with unparalleled negative shock. Asia and Latin America have gone through a number of financial crises in the last few decades but they have addressed those crises rather differently, leading to different growth trajectories after the...

The excess procyclicality of fiscal policy is commonly viewed as a central malaise in emerging economies. We document that procyclicality is more pervasive in countries with higher sovereign risk and provide a model of optimal fiscal policy with nominal rigidities and endogenous sovereign...

Why do countries tend to repay their domestic and external debt, even though the legal enforcement of the sovereign debt contract is limited? Contrary to conventional wisdom, we argue that temporary market exclusion after default is costly. When the domestic financial market is characterized by...

Currency market intervention-cum-reserve accumulation has emerged as the favored "selfinsurance" strategy in recipient countries of excessive private capital inflows. This paper argues that capital account management represents a less costly alternative line of defense deserving renewed...