External capital accounts suffered during the COVID-19 crisis in Latin America and the Caribbean, but perhaps surprisingly the impacts were less severe than in previous crises. Gross capital inflows offset the outflows of residents, in sharp contrast to the global financial crisis of 2008/09...

A growing number of cities around the world have established systems of monitoring the quality of urban life. Many of those systems combine objective and subjective information and attempt to cover a wide variety of topics. This paper introduces a simple method that takes advantage of both types...

Recent work suggests non-financial firms have acted like financial intermediaries particularly in emerging economies. This paper corroborates these findings but then asks "why?". The results indicate evidence for carry-trade activities, but they are focused on countries with higher levels of...

This paper analyzes influences on the credit standing of Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), specifically the quality, diversification and single name concentration of their portfolios, and on the market practice known as Preferred Creditor Status (PCS), whereby sovereigns that default on...

Theory suggests both resilience and fragility in banking networks. This paper finds both, exploiting a new database of cross-border syndicated lending to developing countries from 1993 to 2017. Shocks propagate via co-lenders driven by central players, but shocks impacting fringe banks have...

If rating agencies add no new information to markets, their actions are not a public policy concern. But as rating changes may be anticipated, testing whether ratings add value is not straightforward. This paper argues that ratings and spreads are both noisy signals of fundamentals and suggest...