Recent research on the International Monetary Fund has focused on the adoption, implementation and impact of their lending programs and their political dimensions. This paper evaluates this literature and suggests promising areas of future work. The first area to be surveyed deals with the...

The external balance sheets of many emerging market countries are distinguished by their holdings of assets primarily in the form of foreign debt and foreign exchange reserves, while their liabilities are predominantly equity, either foreign direct investment or portfolio equity. We investigate...

We investigate the impact of foreign equity and debt on the occurrence of banking crises in 61 lower-income and middle-income economies during the 1984-2010 period. We also focus on the effects of domestic institutions on banking crises and whether they mitigate or exacerbate the impact of the...

This paper investigates Alan Greenspan's claim that capital markets can serve as a financial “spare tire” in the event of a banking crisis. We test the impact of stock market capitalization and activity on the output losses of 76 banking crises in 66 countries over the period of 1975-2008....