Monitoring technologies and pay for performance contracts are becoming popular solutions to improve public services delivery. Their track record is however mixed. To show why this may be the case, this paper develops a principal agent model where agents'motivations vary and so does the...

Monitoring technologies and pay for performance (PFP) contracts are becoming popular solutions to improve public services delivery. Their track record is however mixed. To show why this may be the case, this paper develops a principal agent model where agents' motivations vary and so the...

In this paper, we examine how the presence of country insurance schemes affects policymakers' incentives to undertake reforms. Such schemes (especially when made contingent on negative external shocks) are more likely to foster than to delay reform in crisis-prone volatile economies. The...

In an economy a la Diamond and Dybvig (1983), we present an example in which foreign lenders find it profitable to invest in an emerging market if, and only if, the emerging market government imposes taxes on short-term capital inflows. This implies that capital controls that are effective in...

In this paper, we show that a central bank, by announcing and committing ex-ante to a bailout policy that is contingent on the realization of certain states of nature (for instance on the occurrence of an adverse macroeconomic shock), creates a risk-reducing quot;value effectquot; that more than...

The traditional approach to the central bank's lender of last resort function emphasizes the trade-off between being too 'tough', and thus increasing the likelihood that the failure of a single bank hampers the confidence in the whole banking system, and being too 'soft', thereby creating...

We study the impact of competition on banks' risk-taking behavior under different assumptions about deposit insurance and the dissemination of information. While financial opening increases banks' riskiness, a risk-based deposit insurance or, alternatively, the public disclosure of financial...

This paper uses a vertical differentiation duopoly framework to analyze firms` relocation decisions, when the removal of trade barriers or restrictions on capital outflows or inflows (globalization) allows them to serve the domestic market through foreign plants in low-wage countries. The...

To cope with the self-fulfilling liquidity runs that have triggered many recent financial crises, we propose the creation of a country insurance facility. The facility, which we envisage as complementary to the existing multilateral lending facilities, would provide eligible countries with...

Do Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) suffer from a debt overhang? Is debt relief going to improve their growth rates? To answer these important questions, we look at how the debt-growth relationship varies with indebtedness levels and other country characteristics in a panel of developing...