Credit rating changes for long-term foreign currency debt may act as a wake-up call with up-grades and downgrades in one country affecting other financial markets within and across national borders. Such a potential (contagious) rating effect is likely to be stronger in emerging market...

This paper deals with the proposed use of sovereign credit ratings in the "Basel Accord on Capital Adequacy" (Basel II) and considers its potential effect on emerging markets financing. It investigates in a first attempt the consequences of the planned revisions on the two central aspects of...

Foreign portfolio flows constitute a key component of economic activity in small open economies such as Colombia. The dynamics of these flows are subject to the influence of both external (push) factors and domestic (pull) factors. Consequently, economic crises and episodes of financial distress...

In the months preceding the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, banks were willing to pay a premium over the Federal Reserve's discount window (DW) rate to participate in the much less flexible Term Auction Facility (TAF). We empirically test the predictions of a new signalling model...

This paper studies the relationship between liquidity demand risk, deposit diversification and insurance in 12 countries during the period 2005-2014. We capture liquidity risk by focusing on the unfunded loan commitments. We find that higher diversification in the deposit base can reduce the...

This paper examines bank credit growth in emerging markets before, during, and after the 2008-09 financial crisis using bank-level data, focusing on the role of bank ownership. Credit growth by foreign banks lagged behind that of domestic banks in 2009 in Asia, and in 2010 in Latin America and...

Foreign banks have increased their market share in many emerging markets since the mid-1990s. We examine whether this contributed to financial stability in the respective host countries in the global financial crisis. Our results suggest that the stabilizing impact of foreign banks was limited...

We re-appraise the cross-country evidence on the dollarization of financial systems in emerging market economies. Amidst striking heterogeneity of patterns across regions, we identify a broad global trend towards financial sector de-dollarization from the early 2000s to the eve of the global...

We examine the changes in cross-border bank lending during the European sovereign crisis. We find evidence of: (i) a “flight-to-quality” in “core” European sovereigns and residential mortgages that is specific to large highly levered banks with a small number of defaulted loans in their...