The paper analyses whether, and to what extent, emerging market economies (EMEs) have systemic importance for global financial markets, above and beyond their influence during crises episodes. Using a novel database of exogenous economic and political shocks for 14 EMEs, we find that EME shocks...

The first part of this paper examines the behaviour of rupiah over the last seven years (1996 - 2002) to ascertain whether in fact there is specific evidence of a return to de facto US dollar peg in Indonesia. To preview the main conclusion, we find evidence to suggest that this has been the...

The first part of this paper examines the behaviour of rupiah over the last eight years (1995 - 2003) to ascertain whether in fact there is specific evidence of a return to de facto US dollar peg in Indonesia. While we fail to find strong evidence to suggest Indonesia has reverted to the extent...

Whether a real devaluation ultimately proves to be expansionary or contractionary depends on whether the boost given to the exportables sector offsets any possible output-depressing effects that may accompany the expenditure-switching policy. Failure of the exportables sector to adequately...

This paper uses a simple open economy interest rate determination model to empirically examine an important aspect of pre-crisis monetary and exchange rate policy. It investigates whether sterilisation of the reserve effects of capital inflows helped keep interest rates sufficiently high that...

The paper tests whether there were events of contagion, and portfolio shift, in the sovereign bond markets of eleven emerging countries' between January 1995 and November 2001. From existing definitions, we narrow down the concept of contagion by focusing on pricing errors, after general market...

The recent wave of financial crises has fueled the debate on the effect of IFIs intervention on governments' incentives to undertake reforms. In this paper we treat this intervention more generally as a country insurance contract, and examine its implications in a stylized set-up. More...

We analyze optimal ï¬scal,monetary and exchange rate policy in a simple small open econonomy model with price setting frictions.We perform our analysis in the tradition of optimal dynamic Ramsey problems.We characterize optimal allocations and the government policies that implement the optimal...

The purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis has attracted a lot of attention from academics and policy-makers particularly, during the recent float. Most previous studies used data from the developed world. This study examines the validity of the PPP hypothesis using data during the recent...

I construct a micro-model to show that a currency crisis can spread from one country to another even when these countries are unrelated in terms of economic fundamentals and there is no capital linkage across countries through a common lender or an interbank market. The key to explaining...