Country practices towards managing financial risks on a sovereign balance sheet continue to evolve. Each crisis period, and its legacy on sovereign balance sheets, reaffirms the need for strengthening financial risk management. This paper discusses some salient features embedded in in the...

This paper examines how ratings for emerging market economies have been set. Given the high degree of autocorrelation in ratings, we use estimators that yield consistent parameters in the presence of such correlation. The results show that rating changes for emerging market economies have been...

The recent round of debt relief has restored debt sustainability in many low-income countries (LICs). This, along with a continued search for yield and desire for portfolio diversification by investors, has increased the range of viable financing options, including international bonds, for many...

Top down spillovers of sovereign default risk can have serious consequences for the private sector in emerging markets. This paper analyzes the effects of these spillovers using firm-level data from 31 emerging market economies. We assess how sovereign risk affects corporate access to...

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of pertinent issues on sovereign debt restructurings, based on a newly constructed database. This is the first complete dataset of sovereign restructuring cases, covering the six decades from 1950–2010; it includes 186 debt exchanges with foreign...

The paper reviews trends and developments in the rapidly growing local currency debt markets in the WAEMU. The main findings are that common institutions, such as a regional central bank and securities exchange have led to high cross-border transactions within the union. However, excess...

In contrast to the early-warning system literature, we find that currency and debt crises are not closely linked in emerging markets. We find that after 1994, credit ratings predict debt crises but fail to anticipate currency crises. When debt crises are defined as sovereign distress-when...

Crises on external sovereign debt are typically defined as defaults. Such a definition accurately captures debt-servicing difficulties in the 1980s, a period of numerous defaults on bank loans. However, defining defaults as debt crises is problematic for the 1990s, when sovereign bond markets...

This paper investigates the drivers of reserves in emerging markets (EMs) and small island (SIs) and develops an operational metric for estimating reserves in SIs taking into account their unique characteristics. It uses quantile regression techniques to allow the estimated factors driving...