The historical frequency of banking crises is quite similar in high- and middle-to-low-income countries, with quantitative and qualitative parallels in both the run-ups and the aftermath. We establish these regularities using a unique dataset spanning from Denmark's financial panic during the...

This paper presents evidence that public debts in the advanced economies have surged in recent years to levels not recorded since the end of World War II, surpassing the heights reached during the First World War and the Great Depression. At the same time, private debt levels, particularly those...

Newly developed long historical time series on public debt, along with modern data on external debts, allow a deeper analysis of the cycles underlying serial debt and banking crises. The evidence confirms a strong link between banking crises and sovereign default across the economic history of...

We study economic growth and inflation at different levels of government and external debt. Our analysis is based on new data on forty-four countries spanning about two hundred years. The dataset incorporates over 3,700 annual observations covering a wide range of political systems,...

We show, in a reasonably general model, that if a highly indebted country has good investment projects available to it, then it will not benefit from using any of its resources to buy back debt at market prices. Debt buybacks and debt-equity swaps only make sense for the country if these...

The most widely proposed LDC debt plans are flawed by their failure to recognize the fundamental differences between corporate and sovereign debt. Consequently, many plans intended to help highly-indebted countries mainly aid their foreign creditors. This paper emphasizes the crucial distinction...

We show that across developing countries, external debt to private creditors rises more than proportionately with income. We then develop a simple theoretical model consistent with this phenomenon and also consistent with the well-documented relationship between capital market development and...

We develop a novel system of re-classifying historical exchange rate regimes. One difference between our study and previous classification efforts is that we employ an extensive data base on market-determined parallel exchange rates. Our 'natural' classification algorithm leads to a stark...