Central banks' international reserves have increased significantly in the recent past. While this accumulation has been widely perceived as precautionary savings to prevent financial crises, rising reserves might also endanger monetary and financial stability. This paper sheds new light on the...

This paper studies how the maturity structure of external debt is affected by international reserves and how they reinforce financial stability through a more crisis-resilient maturity structure. We show in an illustrative theoretical model that reserves lengthen the maturity of external debt...

Andreas Steiner assesses the relationships between global imbalances, financial crises, and central bank policies, with a specific focus on their reserves. His combination of a strictly international perspective with an analysis based on empirical research enables him to develop an analytical...

We try to reconcile the popular opinion that the Financial Crisis has fundamentally altered equity risk characteristics with empirical data. Our analysis based on Extreme Value Theory suggests that equity tail risks have remained remarkably stable. This means that the loss dynamics of S&P 500...

Central banks' international reserve holdings have increased significantly in the recent past. While traditional models fail to explain this accumulation of reserves, the more recent literature argues that reserves are used as a lifejacket against currency crises. However, research so far has...

We analyse how reversals of several types of capital flows impact currency crises in emerging market and developing economies. Estimates of logit models show that reversals of (equity and debt) portfolio flows significantly increase the likelihood of currency crises in emerging market economies....