We examine in a unified framework three recent perspectives on country risk: debt intolerance, original sin, and currency mismatches. We find statistical evidence supporting aspects of all three, though the strength of that support varies considerably across hypotheses and a number of open questions remain. Our evidence is consistent with the view that good domestic macroeconomic and structural...

In this work we use stochastic processes and correlation networks to model systemic risk between the economies of the European monetary union, in the post crisis period. For each country we consider, as a financial leverage measure, the Debt/GDP ratio. We then model the time dynamic of both the Debt and the GDP by means of a linear combination of two stochastic equations: an eurozone systematic...

Utilizing representative data on 80,000 individuals from 76 countries, this paper studies the world-wide distribution of risk preferences. While a population’s demographic composition as well as the health risks inherent in an environment predict country-level risk attitudes, a large fraction of the substantial between-country variation remains unexplained by traditional sociodemographic, econo...

In Africa, hydro-meteorological disasters (HMDs) have hit with increasing frequency and magnitude in recent years, with detrimental impacts on local livelihoods. African countries display a patchwork of national policies and institutional frameworks to address these rising HMDs. This paper examines the heterogeneity that exists within Africa′s institutional arrangements for climate-related disa...