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...

This paper analyzes the behavior of closed-end country fund discounts, including evidence from the Mexican and East Asian crises. We find that the ratio of fund prices to their fundamental value increases dramatically during a crisis, an anomaly that we denote the “closed-end country fund...