This paper shows that, under fairly general conditions, lending to small countries must be supported by the direct sanctions available to creditors and cannot be supported by a country's "reputation for repayment." This distinction is critically important for understanding the true underlying...

This paper makes a case that the global imbalances of the 2000s and the recent global financial crisis are intimately connected. Both have their origins in economic policies followed in a number of countries in the 2000s and in distortions that influenced the transmission of these policies...

We show that when one takes into account the global equilibrium ramifications of an unwinding of the US current account deficit, currently estimated at 5.4% of GDP, the potential collapse of the dollar becomes considerably larger (more than 50% larger) than our previous estimates (Obstfeld and...

This paper uses a data set of over two hundred years of sovereign debt, banking and inflation crises to explore the question of how long it takes a country to ?graduate? from the typical pattern of serial crisis that most emerging markets experience. We find that for default and inflation...

Cover -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Executive Summary -- Ch 1. A Decade of Debt -- I. Introduction -- II. Surges in Public Debt -- III. The Financial Crash-Sovereign Debt Crisis Sequence -- IV. Debt and Growth -- V. The Aftermath of High Debt: The 1930s and World War II -- VI....