This Paper presents a new model of the East Asian crisis that combines three elements – multiple equilibria, investment collapse, and moral hazard – in a single simple account. We locate the causes of the crisis in poor financial regulation, highly-geared financial institutions, and implicit...

This Paper proposes a new measure of contagion that is good at anticipating future vulnerabilities. Building on previous work, it uses correlations of equity markets across countries to measure contagion, but in a departure from previous practice, measures contagion using the relationship of...

This paper presents a multiple-equilibrium model of the Asian financial crisis. The economy has Krugman-style over-investment caused by weak financial regulation and exacerbated by government guarantees. Following Dooley, the government only has a limited capacity or willingness to honour such...

In an environment characterized by weak contractual enforcement, sovereign lenders can enhance the likelihood of repayment by making their claims more difficult to restructure. We show within a simple model how competition for repayment between lenders may result in sovereign debt that is...

We argue that emerging economies borrow short term due to the high risk premium charged by bondholders on long-term debt. First, we present a model where the debt maturity structure is the outcome of a risk sharing problem between the government and bondholders. By issuing long-term debt, the...

There is a large and growing literature that studies the effects of weak enforcement institutions on economic performance. This literature has focused almost exclusively on primary markets, in which assets are issued and traded to improve the allocation of investment and consumption. The general...

Conventional wisdom says that, in the absence of sufficient default penalties, sovereign risk constraints credit and lowers welfare. We show that this conventional wisdom rests on one implicit assumption: that assets cannot be retraded in secondary markets. Once this assumption is relaxed, there...

Standard asset pricing models have difficulty explaining cross-sectional differences in observed equity risk premia of developed and emerging markets. We argue that national equity returns are subject to sample selectivity and peso biases. The lack of credible commitment to keep capital markets...

The development of government bond markets and, in particular, their currency composition have recently received much interest, partly because of their relation with financial crises. This Paper studies determinants of the size and currency composition of government bond markets for a panel of...

We investigate the pricing of ‘Brady’ bonds that are issued by the governments of five developing countries as part of debt and debt service reduction agreements. We first present a measure of credit quality that takes account of the individual features of each bond and is comparable across...