This project transforms international financial statistics into a form useful for global political analysis. The authors first theorise four distinct faces of a sovereign state's monetary and financial power resources: its international Creditor, Network, Currency, and Governance Capabilities....

This paper explores the drivers of sovereign defaults in 100 countries over the period 1996-2012. We build a new data set of sovereign defaults and find that default events on local and foreign currency bonds are equally likely. However, governments default under different economic and financial...

Listing on a mainland Chinese stock exchange as an alternative to borrowing from a bank is once again in the limelight as foreign-invested companies in China face (1) borrowing limits and minimum capital requirements that depend on their total investment amount, (2) restrictions on borrowing...

In an open economy with endogenous risks, financial development and capital account liberalization reduce the volatilities of home equity and bond prices, and appreciate the home currency at the stochastic steady state. Financial development lowers the equilibrium real interest rate when...

The development of the European Monetary Union is related to Milton Friedman's critique of the Bretton Woods System that started a vigorous debate about “fixed versus flexible exchange rates.” This paper contrasts briefly the arguments pro and con flexible exchange rates at this time. After...

The traditional approach to international finance is to view capital flows as the financial counterpart to savings and investment decisions, assuming further that the GDP boundary defines both the decision-making unit and the currency area. This "triple coincidence" of GDP area, decision-making...

Deposit outflows and a decrease of interbank funding have been compensated by increased borrowing of Greek banks to the Eurosystem. Due to collateral eligibility constraints, most of this funding shifted to ELA. The ECB could raise the haircut rates on the collateral pledged by Greek banks to...

Historically, sovereign debt in local currency has been considered safer than debt in foreign currency. Yet the literature offers scant theoretical or empirical guidance as to why such a gap exists, or why it appears to have slowly and steadily diminished for all regions over the past two...

A modern incarnation of the trilemma is essential for understanding the evolving global financial architecture, and for coming up with ways to mitigate financial fragility. The scarcity of policy instruments relative to the policy goals implies complex country-specific tradeoffs between the...

We examine the empirical determinants of the demand for international reserves and compare the experiences of some Asian and Latin American economies. Our empirical results indicate that different vintages of the model of international reserves give different inferences about the appropriate...