Since 1989, creditor countries have provided debt relief to developing countries worth more than 100 billion US dollars. Prominent lobby groups are campaigning for a further 400 billion US dollars in debt relief to be provided in the near future. How much could developing country’s gain...

From the end of the SecondWorldWar to the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, per-capita GDP in the economies of East Asia grew almost three times as fast as in the economies of Latin America. Specifically, in 1950, the economies of the Asian Tigers (Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan)...

We develop a macroeconomic model with physical and human capital, human capital risk, and limited contract enforcement. We show analytically that young (high-return) households are the most exposed to human capital risk and are also the least insured. We document this risk-insurance pattern in...

Data on the stock of sovereign debt are typically presented at "face value", defined as the undiscounted sum of future principal repayments. This measure has some obvious problems. As it includes only principal repayments, it can give a misleading depiction of relative indebtedness levels, and...

Output falls during emerging market financial crises are large. These declines are not explained by declines in the supply of factors of production, and are hence measured as declines in total factor productivity. Why does productivity decline during a crisis? This paper uses establishment level...

Financial crises in emerging market countries appear to be very costly: output falls are often dramatic, while a host of partial welfare indicators deteriorate as well. The magnitude of the decline in output is puzzling from an accounting perspective, as factor usage does not decline as much as...