A country may adopt policy measures such as raising its foreign exchange reserves to better prepare for foreign interest rate shocks or sudden reversal of international capital flows, which in principle should reduce financial vulnerability for its firms and the entire economy, but the...

We analyze the performance of Indian banks during 2007-09 relative to their vulnerability to a crisis measured using pre-crisis data, in order to study the impact of government guarantees on bank performance during a crisis. Using bank branch-level regulatory data, we exploit geographic...

Central banks increasingly rely on macroprudential measures to manage the financial cycle. However, the effects of such policies on the core objectives of monetary policy to stabilise output and inflation are largely unknown. In this paper, we quantify the effects of changes in maximum...

We propose a model of sovereign debt where countries vary in their level of financial development, defined as the extent to which countries can hedge rare disasters in international capital markets. We show that low levels of financial development generate the "debt intolerance" phenomenon that...

Foreign banks' lending to firms in emerging market economies (EMEs) is large and denominated predominantly in U.S. dollars. This creates a direct connection between U.S. monetary policy and EME credit cycles. We estimate that over a typical U.S. monetary easing cycle, EME borrowers experience a...

This paper examines how a newly designed global safe asset can mitigate international capital flows induced by flight-to-safety. In the model domestic investors have to co-invest in a safe asset along with their physical capital. At times of crisis, investors replace the initially safe domestic...

We study the transmission of sovereign debt inflow shocks on domestic firms. We exploit episodes of large sovereign debt inflows in six emerging countries that are due to the announcements of these countries' inclusion in two major local-currency sovereign debt indexes. We show that these...

This paper develops a threshold-augmented dynamic multi-country model (TGVAR) to quantify the macroeconomic effects of Covid-19. We show that there exist threshold effects in the relationship between output growth and excess global volatility at individual country levels in a significant...

There is growing interest in impact investing, the idea of deploying capital to obtain both financial and social or environmental returns. Examination of every equity investment made by the International Finance Corporation, one of the largest and longest-operating impact investors, across 130...

This paper studies the dollarization of prices in retail markets of emerging economies. We develop a model of the firm's optimal currency choice in retail markets in inflationary economies. We derive theoretical predictions regarding the optimality of dollar pricing, and test them using data...