Capital flow and commodity cycles have long been connected with economic crises. Sparse historical data, however, has made it difficult to connect their timing. We date turning points in global capital flows and commodity prices across two centuries and provide estimates from alternative data...

In 1937, in the midst of the US recovery from the Great Depression, President Roosevelt implemented spending cuts in pursuit of a balanced budget. Subsequently, the unemployment rate jumped nearly 6 percentage points over the next year and the US economy re-entered a major recession. In the...

Debt in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) is at its highest level in half a century. In about nine out of 10 EMDEs, debt is higher now than it was in 2010 and, in half of the EMDEs, debt is more than 30 percentage points of gross domestic product higher. Historically, elevated...

This paper shows that China has launched a new global system for cross-border rescue lending to countries in debt distress. We build the first comprehensive dataset on China's overseas bailouts between 2000 and 2021 and provide new insights into China's growing role in the global financial...

This working paper, based on Carmen Reinhart's Adam Smith Lecture at the 60th NABE Annual Meeting in September 2018, takes a selective global tour of some of the prominent economic and financial risks in advanced, emerging, and low-income developing economies.

In a recent paper on the long coincident behavior of international capital flows, commodity prices, and interest rates in global financial centers, Reinhart, Reinhart, and Trebesch (2016 and 2017) discovered the curious case of missing defaults. Despite the drying up of global capital flows and...

We study sovereign external debt crises over the past 200 years, with a focus on creditor losses, or "haircuts". Our sample covers 327 sovereign debt restructurings with external private creditors over 205 default spells since 1815. Creditor losses vary widely (from none to 100%), but the...

We take a first pass at quantifying the magnitudes of debt relief achieved through default and restructuring in two distinct samples: 1979-2010, focusing on credit events in emerging markets, and 1920-1939, documenting the official debt hangover in advanced economies that was created by World...