Do Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) suffer from a debt overhang? Is debt relief going to improve their growth rates? To answer these important questions, we look at how the debt-growth relationship varies with indebtedness levels and other country characteristics in a panel of developing...

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...

To cope with the self-fulfilling liquidity runs that 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 automatic...

In an economy à la Diamond and Dybvig (1983), we present an example in which foreign lenders find it profitable to invest in an emerging market if, and only if, the emerging market government imposes taxes on short-term capital inflows. This implies that capital controls that are effective in...

Should donors who are interested in the effectiveness of developmental programs rely on conditional budget support or on project aid? To answer this question, we present a model in which only a subset of the developmental expenditures can be subject to conditionality. We show that budget support...

The World Bank Group recently adopted the "cascade framework" to "maximize finance for development." The cascade recommends that reforms be tried first, followed by subsidies, and then public investments. To understand the economics of the cascade, this paper presents a model where reforms,...

Information processing filters out the noise in data but it takes time. Hence, low precision signals are available before high precision signals. To capture this feature, we develop a model of securities trading in which investors can acquire signals (about future cash flows) of increasing...

We propose a new model of trading in OTC markets. Dealers accumulate inventories by trading with end-investors and trade among each other to reduce their inventory holding costs. Core dealers use a more efficient trading technology than peripheral dealers, who are heterogeneously connected to...

We compare the seller's expected revenue in a second price sealed bid auction for a single object in which bidders receive multidimensional signals. Bidders' valuations for the object depend on their signals and a signal observed privately by the seller. We show in various examples that the...

We study how the quality of investors' information across horizons influences investment. In our theory, managers care about how investment is impounded in current stock prices. Because prices imperfectly reflect investment’s value, they under-invest. However, they under-invest less when...