This paper develops and empirically tests a political economy model of sovereign debt. The main incentive for repaying sovereign debt is to maintain access to international capital markets. However, in a democracy, one generation may choose default regardless of its consequences for future...

We use data on the extent to which residents of one country hold the bonds of issuers resident in another as a measure of financial integration or interrelatedness, asking how Asia compares with Europe and Latin America and with the base case in which the purchaser and issuer of the bonds reside...

This article examines the issues and challenges involved for institutions, policy makers, and law-makers in less developed countries in their efforts to implement asset securitization techniques in their financial markets. Challenges and issues in the areas of market development, legislation,...

Using a panel of 16 emerging markets, the paper finds a small but statistically significant effect of stock market developments on private consumption spending. In the short run, a 10 percent decline in the annual real stock market return is associated with a reduction in real private...

The effects of the IMF's data standards initiatives on sovereign borrowing costs in private capital markets are investigated for 26 emerging market and developing countries. Stable and significant panel econometric estimates indicate that subscription to the Special Data Dissemination Standard...

This paper outlines a “modern” approach to managing risks in cross-border capital movements that is consistent with an environment of increased and liberalized capital flows. Key elements of this approach include: a consistent monetary and exchange rate policy mix to avoid incentives for...

“Arbitrage CDOs” have recorded an explosive growth during the years before the outbreak of the financial crisis. In the present paper we discuss potential sources of such arbitrage opportunities, in particular arbitrage gains due to mispricing. For this purpose we examine the risk profiles...

The subprime crisis engulfed not only the US economy, but has also put the global economies under dark clouds of uncertainty. This paper is an attempt to understand the financial crisis and causative factors for the same, the genesis of structured investment vehicles (SIVs), their nature, their...

Basel II rules allow qualified banks to assess the risk in their portfolio of credit exposures with a methodology based on the informational content of credit ratings and two crucial assumptions: (1) the credit risk of individual exposures is driven by one systematic risk factor only and (2) the...

The new bank capital regulation commonly known as Basel II includes a internal rating based approach (IRB) to measuring credit risk in bank portfolios. The IRB relies on the assumptions that the portfolio is fully diversified and that systematic risk is driven by one common factor. In this work...