The international community has sought to assist the development efforts of the CIS-7 countries since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The international financial institutions have played a leading role in these efforts. Despite considerable engagement with the governments of...

In recent decades, foreign assets and liabilities in advanced countries have grown rapidly relative to GDP, with the increase in gross cross-holdings far exceeding the size of net positions. Moreover, the portfolio equity and FDI categories have grown in importance relative to international debt...

Research on the geographical distribution of international portfolios has mainly focused on data aggregated to the country level. We exploit newly-available data that disaggregates the holders and issuers of international securities along sectoral lines. We find that patterns evident in the...

Books reviewed in this article: Gerardo Della Paolera and Alan M. Taylor, Straining at the Anchor: The Argentine Currency Board and the Search for Macroeconomic Stability Terry McKinlay, Macroeconomic Policy, Growth and Poverty Reduction Zdenek Drabek (ed), Globalisation under Threat: The...

We show that the joint presence of moral hazard and repudiation risk generates an important interaction effect. In order to provide the proper incentives to borrowers, the optimal financial contract under moral hazard calls for all available resources to be paid to the lender in the event of a...

The founders of the Bretton Woods System sixty years ago were primarily concerned with orderly exchange rate adjustment in a world economy that was characterized by widespread restrictions on international capital mobility. In contrast, the rapid pace of financial globalization during recent...

In this paper, I review recent trends in global integration of financial systems and assess the implications for international macroeconomic adjustment. While recent growth in the scale of international balance sheets has been dramatic, product markets remain quite segmented. The mis-match...

In our recent Economic Policy article (Honohan and Lane, 2003), we argued that the strength of the US dollar 1999-2001 had an important impact on inflation divergence within the EMU and in particular the surge in Ireland's inflation to over 7 percent. This hypothesis has been subjected to a...

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...

A driving factor in any open-economy macroeconomics model is the degree of international financial integration. This suggests that understanding the sources of the recent explosive growth in cross-border asset trade and the impact of the upscaling in gross and net international investment...