This paper surveys the literature on sovereign debt from the perspective of understanding how sovereign debt differs from privately issue debt, and why sovereign debt is deemed safe in some countries but risky in others. The answers relate to the unique power of the sovereign. One the one hand,...

This paper explores how much of the movements in the sovereign spreads of Asian economies over the course of the global financial crisis has reflected shifts in (i) global risk aversion; (ii) country-specific risks, directly from worsening fundamentals, and indirectly from spillovers originating...

This paper examines whether there is a threshold above which financial development no longer has a positive effect on economic growth. We use different empirical approaches to show that there can indeed be "too much" finance. In particular, our results suggest that finance starts having a...

Why do asset price bubbles continue to appear in various markets? This paper provides an overview of recent literature on bubbles, with significant attention given to behavioral models and rational models with frictions. Unlike the standard rational models, the new literature is able to model...

This paper explores the extent to which macroprudential tools can be used to manage banking sector risks in Mongolia, a commodity producing country exposed to both procyclical and cross-sectional financial sector risks. Loose fiscal policy, rising credit activity, and heightened risk appetite...

This paper examines how Japan's long-term interest rates and Japanese banks' interest rate risk exposures may evolve under Abenomics. Results from a panel regression analysis for major advanced economies shows that long-term government bond yields in Japan are determined to a large extent by...

This paper assesses the implications of Chinese capital account liberalization for capital flows. Stylized facts from capital account liberalization in advanced and large emerging market economies illustrate that capital account liberalization has historically generated large gross capital in-...

Interest rate derivatives on major currencies, with notional outstanding amounts adding up to hundreds of trillions, are mostly indexed on Libor and Euribor benchmarks, as are hundreds of billions in loans to enterprises, mortgages and other retail loans to the real economy. Yet, the prevailing...

We create a network of bilateral correlations of changes in sovereign bond yields and individual bank equity price changes since 2000. We extract some stylized facts from this network of asset price correlations and document the clear differences in asset price correlations between safe havens...

By constructing and estimating a structural arbitrage-free model of demand pressures on US real rates, we find that recent purchases of US government debt securities by the Fed and foreign officials have significantly affected the level and the dynamics of US real rates. In particular, by 2008,...