This chapter revisits the sudden stop in capital flows episode experienced by Chile in 1998. It documents the macroeconomic environment, the macro framework in place, and the shocks that hit it. The chapter examines the policy reaction to the shocks, evaluating its most likely consequences and...

This publication was undertaken in the context of the International Forum on Latin American Perspectives, jointly organized by the Inter-American Development Bank and the OECD Development Centre. The IDB and the OECD Development Centre created this forum as an annual meeting place of ideas and...

This paper asks whether bonanzas (surges) in net capital inflows increase the probability of banking crises and whether this is necessarily through a lending boom mechanism. A fixed effects regression analysis indicates that a baseline bonanza, identified as a surge of one standard deviation...

This paper proposes a new taxonomy of Sudden Stops comprised of seven categories with definitions depending on the behavior of gross and net capital flows. The incidence of different types of Sudden Stops is tracked over time and the type of Sudden Stop related to economic performance. Sudden...

This paper analyzes the relevance of external factors in average quarterly GDP growth for 1990-2006 in the seven largest Latin American countries (LAC7). Modeling the relationship between LAC7 GDP and several external factors, it is found that those factors account for a significant share of...

This paper presents an analytical overview of recent contributions to the literature on the policy implications of capital flows in emerging and developing countries, focusing specifically on capital inflows as well as on the links between inflows and subsequent capital-flow reversals. The...

This paper explores whether the level of financial integration of banks in a country increases the incidence of systemic banking crises. The paper uses a de facto proxy for financial integration based on network statistics of banks participating in the global market of interbank syndicated...

If rating agencies add no new information to markets, their actions are not a public policy concern. But as rating changes may be anticipated, testing whether ratings add value is not straightforward. This paper argues that ratings and spreads are both noisy signals of fundamentals and suggest...

This paper analyzes alternative models for emerging sovereign ratings. Although a small number of economic fundamentals explain ratings reasonably well, variations in those economic fundamentals are themselves explained by a small number of world factors. On the other hand, global financial...

Countries that are classified as having floating exchange rate systems (or very wide bands) show strikingly different patterns of behavior. They hold very different levels of international reserves and allow very different volatilities in the movements of the exchange rate relative to the...