This paper explores the economic determinants of market-assessed sovereign risk of members of the European monetary union. The empirical work is innovative in its Merton structural specification of appropriate inputs. It provides a theoretical background for the empirical investigation of...

Political economy theory expects politicians to use budget deficits to engineer an election-timed boom, known as the political business cycle. We challenge and contextualize this view by incorporating the financial constraints faced by governments into an electoral framework. We argue that the...

Until recently, there have been few efforts to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. To help fill this gap, the Bank of Canada's Credit Rating Assessment Group (CRAG) has developed a comprehensive database of...

This paper investigated the link between inflation and the top decile income share after the global financial crisis. The analysis was done on a sample of 42 countries. We found that higher inflation has reduced the income going to the top decile. The main explanation is that inflation has...

India's financial sector is not deeply integrated with the global financial system, which spared it the first round adverse effects of the global financial crisis and left Indian banks mostly unaffected. However, as the financial crisis morphed in to a full-blown global economic downturn, India...

The 2007-2010 Global Financial Crisis has reshuffled the cards for central bankers throughout the world. In the wake of the biggest crisis since the Great Depression, we examine the evolution of modern central banking since the inflationary chaos of the 1970s and the controversial monetarist...

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the Great Depression (1929-1933) and the Great Financial Crisis (2007-2009) by contrasting the crises' main driving forces and how they relate to each other with respect to the United States. To this end, causes, consequences and measures undertaken...