We analyze the sovereign bond issuance data of eight major emerging markets (EMs) - Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and Turkey from 1970 to 2018. Our analysis suggests that (i) EM local currency bonds tend to be smaller in size, shorter in maturity, or lower in...

This case study compares the importance of prevailing market factors against COVID-19 dynamics and policy responses in explaining the daily evolution of emerging market (EM) sovereign CDS spreads during the first half of 2020. We adopt a two-stage econometric approach. In the first stage, we...

We evaluate the 1968 H3N2 Flu pandemic’s economic cost in a cross-section of 52 countries. Using excess mortality rates as a proxy for the country-specific severity of the pandemic, we find that the average mortality rate (0.0062% per pandemic wave) was associated with declines in consumption...

The paper compares fiscal cyclicality across regions and countries from 1960 to 2016. It finds that more than half of 170 countries analyzed in seven regions had, in more recent years, limited fiscal space, and that their fiscal policy was either cyclical or procyclical. This was particularly...

We evaluate the quartile ranking of countries during the Covid-19 pandemic using both official (i.e., confirmed) and excess mortality data. Contrasting countries' rankings using these two data sources reveal sharp and systematic differences. While higher GDP per capita is associated with a worse...

The global crisis highlights the continued vulnerability of developing countries to shocks from advanced economies. Just a few years after the global crisis, the eurozone sovereign debt crisis has emerged as the single biggest threat to the global outlook. In this paper, we apply the event study...