Should South-Mediterranean economies continue their financial integration in the world economy, considering their current stance and in view of the experiences of developed economies with the global financial crisis? The economies of the North-African rim, that is Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia,...

Theoretical models predict that countries with unchanged long-run savings preferences will respond to debt relief by running up new debts or by running down assets. And there are some signs that incremental debt relief over the past two decades has fulfilled those predictions. Debt relief is...

When does the combination of flexible exchange rates and domestic inflation-oriented monetary policy guarantee insulation from global financial conditions? We examine a dynamic global game model of international portfolio flows where, for some combination of parameters, the unique equilibrium...

Recent discussions at the IMF and the G-20 on strengthening the international monetary system have emphasized, among other efforts, increasing the financial depth of emerging markets. Such deepening is widely believed to confer important stability benefits, helping countries limit swings in...

We investigate global factors associated with bank capital flows. We formulate a model of the international banking system where global banks interact with local banks. The solution highlights the bank leverage cycle as the determinant of the transmission of financial conditions across borders...

A modern incarnation of the trilemma is essential for understanding the evolving global financial architecture, and for coming up with ways to mitigate financial fragility. The scarcity of policy instruments relative to the policy goals implies complex country-specific tradeoffs between the...

Although the sovereign debt crisis is worldwide considered as a main disorder affecting indebted countries' economic recovery, its analysis is still incomplete and has so far failed to provide a satisfactory explanation of its origin and of the way it can be successfully addressed. The aim of...

There is a perception that IMF programmes are not catalytic and instead associated with large capital outflows, higher refinancing costs for sovereigns and adverse movements in stock markets. This has led to concerns that an expectation of adverse effects of IMF programmes may deter countries...

This paper presents a model to explain how IMF programmes can catalyse private capital flows following a financial crisis, a concept that was at the heart of the IMF's strategy for dealing with capital account crises in the late 1990s. In the model, the IMF lends funds below the prevailing...

We investigate the role of global factors in driving cross-border capital flows. We formulate a model of gross capital flows through the banking sector and derive a closed form solution that highlights the leverage cycle of global banks and its interaction with recipient country characteristics....