Financial globalization has increased dramatically over the past three decades, particularly for advanced economies, while emerging market and developing countries experienced more moderate increases. Divergences across countries stem from different capital control regimes, and factors such as...

This paper seeks to revive the case for countries to self-insure against economic growth slowdowns by issuing GDP-indexed bonds. We simulate the effects of GDP-indexed bonds under different assumptions about fiscal policy reaction functions and their output effects and find that they could...

This paper analyzes yield spreads on sovereign debt issued by emerging markets using modern data from the 1990s and newly-collected historical data on debt traded in London during 1870–1913, a previous “golden era” for international capital market integration. Applying several empirical...

Output drops are usually associated with major disruption for the residents of affected countries, both directly and often through ensuing, prolonged growth slowdowns. Using a century of data, we document that output drops are more frequent in countries at a lower stage of economic development....

This note summarizes the main arguments put forward by some market commentators who argue that default is inevitable, and presents a rebuttal for each argument in turn. Their main arguments focus on the size of the adjustment and continued market concerns reflected in government bond spreads....

While a number of emerging market crises were characterized by widespread contagion during the 1990s, more recent crises (notably, in Argentina) have been mostly contained within national borders. This has led some observers to wonder whether contagion might have become a feature of the past,...

A widespread view holds that countries that finance themselves through foreign direct investment (FDI) and portfolio equity, rather than bonds and loans, are less prone to crises. But what determines countries' external capital structures? In a cross section of emerging markets and developing...

This paper studies the correlation between output growth and lagged stock returns in a panel of emerging market economies and advanced economies. It finds that the correlation is as strong in emerging market economies as in advanced economies. Asset prices therefore contain valuable information...