To the extent that they exert a critical influence on the macroeconomic environment, monetary and exchange rate policies (MERP) are relevant for development. However, the analytical economic literature often sees nominal variables as being irrelevant for the real economy, while the multiplicity...

Recent empirical research on emerging markets debt, currency crises and fiscal sustainability has placed a significant focus on the role of currency mismatches with the emphasis placed on the currency composition of explicit government liabilities . The key insight of this paper is that these...

In recent years the term "fear of floating" has been used to describe exchange rate regimes that, while officially flexible, in practice intervene heavily to avoid sudden or large depreciations. However, the data reveals that in most cases (and increasingly so in the 2000s) intervention has been...

The literature has identified at least five approaches to the determinants of the choice of exchange rate regimes: i) optimal currency area theory; ii) exchange rate policy and the absortion of real and nominal shocks; iii) exchange rate rules as a policy crutch in credibility-challenged...

In this paper, we introduce the first comprehensive database on sovereign debt systematically compiled to ensure comparability, for all countries in the Americas, and use this new data to highlight the main stylized facts regarding sovereign debt for developing America in the last two decades....

This paper estimates bond-by-bond “haircuts”—realized investor losses—in recent debt restructurings in Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan, Ecuador, Argentina, and Uruguay. We consider both external and domestic retructurings. Haircuts are computed as the percentage difference between the present...

We study the long-term impact of job displacement from a big state owned enterprise as a result of its privatization in a developing country. Our results suggest large reductions in earnings, which persist throughout the years. However, we also find that the displaced worker’s...

The existence of sovereign debt relies on the ability of creditors to impose costs on defaulting debtors. In their seminal contribution Eaton and Gersovitz (1981) began the modern literature on sovereign debt by assuming that creditors could not impose sanctions but could exclude debtor...