High public debt often produces the drama of default and restructuring. But debt is also reduced through financial repression, a tax on bondholders and savers via negative or below market real interest rates. After WWII, capital controls and regulatory restrictions created a captive audience for...

Studies show that in addition to losing people's lives, the consequences are just as bad for the economy.Natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, massive fires etc. inflict serious damage and so seem to be bad for the economy. Depending on the experience in different countries, the...

This paper studies the impact of the state-dependent risk of a government default on the correlation of the scal balance and current account. We use a small open economy model where nonlinear risk premia arise endogenously when the government operates close to its scal limit, i.e. the maximum...

Financial stability is an important policy objective, since crises are associated with large economic, social and political costs. Promoting stability requires preventing "sudden stops" in capital flows, which are events in which foreign financing abruptly disappears. This paper contributes to...

Openness to trade is one factor that has been identified as determining whether a country is prone to sudden stops in capital inflows, crashes in currencies, or severe recessions. Some believe that openness raises vulnerability to foreign shocks, while others believe that it makes adjustment to...

Legal restrictions on international capital movements are imposed in many countries in an attempt to (partially) insulate their economies from abroad and pursue some degree of domestic policy independence. But is the imposition of capital controls effective in achieving these goals? We...

The paper investigates whether higher financial integration leads in general to slower current account adjustments. The study estimates theoretically founded trade balance reaction functions for a panel of seventy countries from 1970-2004. The empirical analysis finds that adjustment in...

This paper evaluates the impact of international reserves, terms of trade shocks and capital flows on the real exchange rate (REER). We observe that international reserves cushions the impact of TOT shocks on the REER, and that this effect is important for developing but not for industrial...

This paper presents and describes a new dataset of capital control restrictions on both inflows and outflows of 10 categories of assets for 100 countries over the period 1995 to 2013. Building on the data first presented in Schindler (2009) and other datasets based on the analysis of the IMF's...

This paper presents an analytical overview of recent contributions to the literature on the policy implications of capital flows in emerging and developing countries, focusing specifically on capital inflows as well as on the links between inflows and subsequent capital-flow reversals. The...