This paper investigates whether the price response to credit rating agency (CRA) announcements on sovereign bonds has diminished since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). We characterize credit rating events more precisely than previous work, controlling agency announcements for the prior credit...

During the 1930s, rating agencies took up a central role in regulatory supervision that they still have today. The proximate cause for this changeover was the economic shock of the Great Depression. Exploring the performance of rating agencies in assessing the risks of sovereign debt, an...

During the 1930s, rating agencies took up a central role in regulatory supervision that they still have today. The proximate cause for this changeover was the economic shock of the Great Depression. Exploring the performance of rating agencies in assessing the risks of sovereign debt, an...

Global current account imbalances have been at the forefront of policy debates over the past few years. Many observers have recently singled them out as a key factor contributing to the global financial crisis. Current account surpluses in several emerging market economies are said to have...

This essay argues that the Achilles heel of the international monetary and financial system is that it amplifies the "excess financial elasticity" of domestic policy regimes, ie it exacerbates their inability to prevent the build-up of financial imbalances, or outsize financial cycles, that lead...

Has financial globalisation compromised central banks' ability to manage domestic financial conditions? This paper tackles this question by studying the dynamics of bond yields encompassing 31 advanced and emerging market economies. To gauge the extent to which external financial conditions...

In analyzing the performance of the international monetary and financial system (IMFS), too much attention has been paid to the current account and far too little to the capital account. This is true of both formal analytical models and historical narratives. This approach may be reasonable when...

This paper investigates the effect of cyclical macroeconomic policy and financial sector characteristics on growth. Using cross-country, cross-industry OECD data, it yields two main findings. First, countercyclical fiscal and monetary policies foster growth disproportionately in more...

The global long-term interest rate now matters much more for the monetary policy choices facing emerging market economies than a decade ago. The low or negative term premium in the yield curve in the advanced economies from mid-2010 has pushed international investors into EM local bond markets:...