The cost of holding reserves is often estimated as the sovereign spread over the risk-free return on reserves paid on the debt issued to purchase them, which ignores the benign effect of reserves on the spread. This paper illustrates this numerically, showing that these costs, as typically...

In a model of sovereign debt with endogenous default, we find a non-monotonic relationship between default risk and volatility, reflecting a trade-off between prudence and the insurance value of default. We show that this feature also holds in the data.

To understand the growth effects of currency undervaluation we estimate its impact on the different components of GDP. We find that, for developing countries, undervaluation does not affect the tradable sector, but does lead to greater domestic savings and investment, as well as employment.