The Latin American debt crises in the 1980s and the Asian crisis in the late 1990s both provided impetus for reforming the framework for restructuring sovereign debt. In the late 1980s, the Brady plan established the importance of substantive debt relief in addressing some crises. A decade...

Despite a vast empirical literature that assesses the impact of financial integration on the economy, evidence of substantial welfare gains from consumption risk sharing remains elusive. While maintaining the usual cross-country perspective of the literature, this paper explicitly accounts for...

This paper builds a two-country DSGE model to study the quantitative impact of financial frictions on business cycle co-movements when investors have foreign asset exposure. The investor in each country holds capital in both countries and faces a leverage constraint on her debt. I show...

The answer as to whether there are gains from pooling real-time oil price forecasts depends on the objective. The approach of combining five of the leading forecasting models with equal weights dominates the strategy of selecting one model and using it for all horizons up to two years. Even more...

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic impact of oil shocks in four of the largest oil-consuming Asian economies, using a structural vector autoregressive model. We identify three different types of oil shocks via sign restrictions: an oil supply shock, an oil demand shock driven by global...

We use internationally comparable household-level data for ten euro area economies and the United States to investigate cross-country differences in debt holdings and the potential of debt overhang. U.S. households have the highest prevalence of both collateralized and non-collateralized debt,...

How does aggregate profit uncertainty influence investment activity at the firm level? We propose a parsimonious adaptation of a factor-autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model to exploit information in a subindustry sales panel for an efficient and tractable estimation of aggregate...

Emerging-market economies have become increasingly important in driving global GDP growth over the past 10 to 15 years. This has made timely and accurate assessment of current and future economic activity in emerging markets important for policy-makers not only in these countries but also in...

Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about price expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because time-varying risk premia often render the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of the underlying asset....

The transmission of oil price shocks has been a question of central interest in macroeconomics since the 1970s. There has been renewed interest in this question after the large and persistent fall in the real price of oil in 2014-16. In the context of this debate, Ramey (2017) makes the striking...