Before the crisis of 1997-98, the East Asian economies except for Japan but including China pegged their currencies to the U.S. dollar. To avoid further turmoil, the IMF now argues that these currencies should float more freely. However, our econometric estimations show that the dollar's...

Before the crisis of 1997/98, the East Asian economies - except for Japan but including China - pegged their currencies to the US dollar. To avoid further turmoil, the IMF argues that these currencies should float more freely. However, the authors' econometric estimations show that the dollar's...

We address the problem how to estimate default probabilities for sovereign countries based on market data of traded debt. A structural Merton-type model is applied to a sample of emerging market and transition countries. In this context, only few and heterogeneous default probabilities are...