Recent debate on the reform of the international financial architecture has highlighted the potentially important role of the official sector in crisis management. This paper examines how such public intervention in sovereign debt crises affects efficiency, ex ante and ex post. The results shed...

This paper examines whether recent international policy initiatives to facilitate financial rescues in emerging market countries have influenced debtors' incentives to access official sector resources. The paper highlights a country's systemic importance as a key characteristic that drives...

This paper examines whether recent international policy initiatives to facilitate financial rescues in emerging market countries have influenced debtors' incentives to access official sector resources. The paper highlights a country's systemic importance as a key characteristic that drives...

This paper analyses how the risk-sharing capacity of the financial system varies over the business cycle, leading to procyclical fragility. We show how financial imperfections contribute to underinsurance by entrepreneurs, generating an externality that leads to the build-up of systematic risk...

We present a general equilibrium model of intermediation designed to capture some of the key features of the modern financial system. The model incorporates financial constraints and state-contingent contracts, and captures the spillovers associated with asset fire sales during periods of...

This paper proposes a method for measuring investor risk appetite based on the variation in the ratio of risk-neutral to subjective probabilities used by investors in evaluating possible future returns to an asset. Unlike other indicators advanced in the literature, our measure of market...

We present a general equilibrium model of intermediation designed to capture some of the key features of the modern financial system. The model incorporates financial constraints and state-contingent contracts, and contains a clearly defined pecuniary externality associated with asset fire sales...

We examine the safety of government bonds in the presence of Knightian uncertainty amongst financial market participants. In our model, the information insensitivity of government bonds is driven by strategic complementarities across counterparties and the structure of trading relationships. We...