We provide a systematic analysis of bilateral, source and host factors driving portfolio equity investment across countries, using newly released data on international equity holdings at the end of 2001. We develop a model that links bilateral equity holdings to bilateral trade in goods and...

In the aftermath of the international debt crisis of the 1980s reciprocal trade arrangements experienced a resurgence. This paper examines how countertrade can help highly indebted countries to finance imports if they are not able to use standard credit arrangements. It compares the credit...

This paper studies how private banks dealt with sovereign risk before World War I. At that time there was no multilateral institution to bail out borrowers in default and sovereign rating had not yet developed. All the burden of information collection and processing was borne out by individual...

Current capital flows are closely monitored, but surprisingly little is known about the stocks of external assets and liabilities held by various countries, especially in the developing world. This paper constructs estimates of foreign assets and liabilities and their equity and debt...

A windfall of foreign aid or natural resource revenue faces government with choices of how to manage public borrowing, public asset accumulation, and the distribution of funds to households (across time and household types), particularly when the windfall is both anticipated and temporary. These...

This paper shows that politics matter in explaining defaults on external and domestic debt obligations. We explore a large number of political and macroeconomic variables using a nonparametric technique to predict safety from default. The advantage of this technique is that it is able to...

Nous modifions un modele de taux reel d'equilibre pour etudier les effets de la disparition de la bulle speculative qui affecte probablement les prix des actions a Wall Street. Nous introduisons un equilibre keynesien de court terme, et une dependance du taux d'interet des prets faits par le...

Nous construisons un modele theorique qui introduit la relation entre preteurs etrangers et emprunteurs domestiques dans le modele de crise de balance des paiements. Si les emprunteurs font defaut, une partie des prets faits par les preteurs etrangers, dependant de la gravite du defaut, n'est...

Conventional wisdom holds that overlending problems and banking crises in open economies are provoked by investor moral hazard, which is caused in turn by guarantees on deposits. This Paper shows that this is not necessarily the case: guarantees on deposits may even limit the losses banks...

This paper presents a multiple-equilibrium model of the Asian financial crisis. The economy has Krugman-style over-investment caused by weak financial regulation and exacerbated by government guarantees. Following Dooley, the government only has a limited capacity or willingness to honour such...