This paper studies the relationship between sovereign spreads and the interaction between debt composition and debt levels in advanced and emerging market countries. It finds that in emerging market countries there is a significant correlation between spreads and debt levels. This correlation,...

The conventional paradigm about development banks is that these institutions exist to target well-identified market failures. However, market failures are not directly observable and can only be ascertained with a suitable learning process. Hence, the question is how do the policymakers know...

Notwithstanding announcements of progress, "international original sin" (the denomination of external debt in foreign currency) remains a persistent phenomenon in emerging markets. Although some middle-income countries have succeeded in developing markets in local-currency sovereign debt and...

This paper summarizes the main findings of the literature on the relationship between financial and economic development (the known knowns), points to directions for future research (the known unknowns), and then speculates on the third Rumsfeldian category. The known knowns section organizes...

This paper uses the rules of engineering as a rhetorical device to discuss why the international financial architecture needs a structured mechanism for dealing with sovereign insolvency. The paper suggests that the most important problem with the status-quo relates to delayed defaults and...

This paper contributes the on-going debate on income inequality in advanced economies with a proposal aimed at reducing costly investment mistakes that are prevalent among middle-class households. The paper starts by describing how households should invest, compares it with what we know about...

This paper describes and quantifies fiscal risk in advanced and developing economies. Forecast errors in GDP growth explain nearly half of fiscal risk in advanced economies. However, errors in growth forecasts are less important in explaining fiscal risk in low- and middle-income countries. Most...

This paper builds a new dataset on bank ownership and reassesses the links between state-ownership of banks and each of financial development, economic growth, financial stability, bank performance, liquidity creation, and lending cyclicality. Using panel data to estimate the short-and...

This paper builds a dataset on bank ownership that covers more than 6,500 banks in 181 countries (59 low-income economies, 72 middle-income economies, and 50 high-income economies) over 1995-2020. I show that until 2010, there was a reduction in state-ownership of banks and an increase foreign...