To cope with the self-fulfilling liquidity runs that have triggered many recent financial crises, we propose the creation of a country insurance facility. The facility, which we envisage as complementary to the existing multilateral lending facilities, would provide eligible countries with...

This paper evaluates ways to protect highly dollarized banking systems from systemic liquidity runs (such as the ones that took place recently in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay). In view of the limitations of available (private or official) insurance schemes, and the distortions introduced by...

2 Universidad Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina and Inter-American Development Bank. De facto (unofficial) dollarization defined as the holding by residents of assets and liabilities denominated in a foreign currency is a policy concern in an increasing number of developing economies....

The paper presents a model of irreversible investment under uncertainty, where investment takes place whenever a threshold level of marginal returns is reached. The threshold depends positively on price volatility; a change from high to low inflation induces an upward capital stock adjustment....

This paper analyzes the behavior of closed-end country fond discounts, including evidence from the Mexican and East Asian crises. We find that the ratio of fund prices to their fundamental value increases dramatically during a crisis, an anomaly that we denote the quot;closed-end country fund...

This paper studies the impact of competition on the determination of interest rates and banks` risk-taking behavior under different assumptions about deposit insurance and the dissemination of financial information. It finds that lower entry costs foster competition in deposit rate sand reduce...

This paper examines how public disclosure of banks` risk exposure affects banks` risk-taking incentives and assesses how the presence of informed depositors influences the soundness of the banking system. It finds that, when banks have complete control over the volatility of their loan...

This paper presents a portfolio model of financial intermediation in which currency choice is determined by hedging decisions on both sides of a bank`s balance sheet. Minimum variance portfolio (MVP) allocations are found to provide a natural benchmark to estimate the scope for dollarization of...

This paper shows that a central bank, by announcing and committing ex-ante to a bailout policy that is contingent on the realization of certain states of nature (for example on the occurrence of an adverse macroeconomic shock), creates a risk-reducing quot;value effectquot; that more than...

The removal of government guarantees in borrowing countries does not eliminate the moral hazard problem posed by the existence of deposit guarantees in lender countries. The paper shows that, after restrictions on international capital flows are lifted, banks in low-risk developed countries...