The risk of default that business firms face is very significant and differs widely across countries. This paper explores the links between countries' business conditions and international trade embedment and the default risk at the country level from a theoretical point of view. Our main...

By using data from nine waves of the IMF Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey, we explore the determinants of bilateral portfolio investments and their dynamics. The main goal of our analysis is that of understanding whether a diversifi cation motive can be found, among the various...

This paper criticises the standard methodology used to measure the importance of different channels of risk sharing in federal states such as the one used in Asdrubali et al.'s (1996) seminal contribution. It argues that the methodology chosen in these papers systematically underestimates the...