High-debt countries may face the risk of self-fulfilling debt crises. If the public expects that in the future the government will be unable to roll over the maturing debt, they may refuse to buy debt today and choose to hold foreign assets. This lack of confidence may then be self-fulfilling....

Are structural reforms growth enhancing? Is the effectiveness of reforms constrained by a country's distance from the technology frontier or by its institutional environment? This paper takes a new and comprehensive look at these questions by employing a novel data set that includes several...

At the inception of economic and monetary union (EMU), an open question was whether execution of monetary policy by the Eurosystem could effectively stabilize liquidity and short-term interest rates. Potential problems could arise from the central bank’s limited knowledge of the new euro area...

High debt countries may face the risk of self-fulfilling debt crises. If the public expects that in the future the government will be unable to roll over the maturing debt, they may refuse to buy debt today and choose to hold foreign assets. This lack of confidence may then be self-fulfilling....

The paper uses Italian daily data from January 1991 to July 1992 (a period in which the lira belonged to the narrow EMS band without foreign exchange controls) to measure the relationship between liquidity and interest rates. The high quality of the data allows us to separate that part of...