World financial markets have been in turmoil as investors grapple with the possibility that Greece and perhaps Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Spain will default on their debts. The 2011 downgrade of the S&P outlook for US debt to “negative” suggests that there may eventually be concerns that...

This paper evaluates the current literature on dollarization and finds it to be disappointing in its ability to explain many of the prevailling features of the dollarizations experiences in Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. The paper takes a different approach to the...

Output effects of currency crises are often estimated to be negative and persistent. A new banking crisis database allows us to construct pure currency collapses that are not associated with banking crises. The estimates show that countries facing a pure currency crisis have full recovery of...