The World Bank and the IMF have adopted a debt sustainability framework (DSF) to evaluate the risk of debt distress in Low Income Countries (LICs). At the core of the DSF are empirically-based thresholds for each of five different measures of the debt burden (the “debt threshold approach”...

This paper examines how international remittances are affected by structural characteristics, macroeconomic conditions, and adverse shocks in both source and recipient economies. We exploit a novel, rich panel data set, covering bilateral remittances from 103 Italian provinces to 107 developing...

What determines the ability of low-income developing countries to issue bonds in international capital and what explains the spreads on these bonds? This paper examines these questions using a dataset that includes emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) that issued sovereign bonds at...

This paper offers novel evidence on the impact of raising bank capital requirements in the context of an emerging market: Peru. Using quarterly bank-level data and exploiting the adoption of bank-specific capital buffers, we find that higher capital requirements have a short-lived, negative...

We examine the impact of a large-scale microcredit expansion program on financial access and the transition of previously unbanked borrowers to commercial banks. Using administrative micro-data covering the universe of loans to individuals from a developing country, we show that the program...

We develop an empirical model to predict banking crises in a sample of 60 low-income countries (LICs) over the 1981-2015 period. Given the recent emergence of financial sector stress associated with low commodity prices in several LICs, we assign price movements in primary commodities a key role...

The empirical literature on sovereign debt crises identifies the level of public debt (measured as a share of GDP) as a key variable to predict debt defaults and to determine sovereign market access. This evidence has led to the widespread use of (country-specific) debt thresholds to assess debt...

We analyze the employment effects of financial shocks using a rich data set of job contracts, matched with the universe of firms and their lending banks in one Italian region. To isolate the effect of the financial shock we construct a firm-specific time-varying measure of credit supply. The...