Do highly indebted countries suffer from a debt overhang? Can debt relief foster their growth rates? To answer these important questions, this article looks at how the debt-growth relation varies with indebtedness levels, as well as with the quality of policies and institutions, in a panel of...

Cet article essaie d'évaluer, à travers un exemple, les effets en termes de bien-être de la libéralisation des échanges intra-industriels entre deux pays. Si il est vrai que la libéralisation des échanges accroît le bien être « mondial », sous certaines conditions un des deux pays...

One of the most usual claims in the debate on economic Integration is that trade liberalization and a fortiori free trade agreements are at the greater advantage of consumers of all countries. In this paper we show that this statement should be temperated if the countries differ considerably...

This paper analyses the impact of public disclosure of banks’ risk exposure on banks’ risk taking incentives and its implications in terms of soundness of the banking system. We find that, when banks have a complete control over the volatility of their loan portfolio, public disclosure...

This paper studies the impact of competition on the determination of interest rates, and on banks’ risk taking behaviour, under different assumptions about deposit insurance and the dissemination of financial information. We find that lower entry costs foster competition in deposit rates and...

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...