Within the last decade sizeable capital inflows from mature economies were accompanied by rapid financial deepening in the Western Balkans, Turkey and the CIS. Notwithstanding their considerably different initial positions most countries sustained financial stability in the first period of the...

During financial disruptions, marketmakers provide liquidity by absorbing external selling pressure. They buy when the pressure is large, accumulate inventories, and sell when the pressure alleviates. This paper studies optimal dynamic liquidity provision in a theoretical market setting with...

In late 1997, Korea experienced a huge and unusual economic crisis. The three main features of this crisis are the sudden recession, the rapid recovery and a consumption drop as large as the output drop. A large body of literature qualitatively explains the Korean crisis in terms of financial...

Once again the economic experts are telling us that the current (October 2008) financial “crisis” will lead to a deep recession or depression. The financial press is even claiming that we are headed for “global meltdown”. Heard it all before? The last time was in 1998 when we were told...

We bootstrapped spot rates for Argentinean and U.S. federal government debt instruments, and fitted them with smoothing cubic splines, a non-parametric method, to estimate the term structure of interest rates. When estimating the term structure one must decide how close should the data be...