We analyze banking crises using a panel of macroeconomic and financial data for more than one hundred developing countries from 1975 through 1992. We find that banking crises in emerging markets are strongly associated with adverse external conditions. In particular Northern interest rates are...

This paper uses 68 measures of trade policy and trade liberalization to ask if membership in theWorld Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is associated with more liberal trade policy. Almost no measures of trade policy are significantly...

A country's suitability for entry into a currency union depends on a number of economic conditions. These include, inter alia, the intensity of trade with other potential members of the currency union, and the extent to which domestic business cycles are correlated with those of the other...

This paper addresses the issue of whether regimes of fixed exchange rates are a mechanism for shifting volatility inter- temporally. Using a panel of data covering twenty industrialized countries from 1959 through 1993, I examine the volatilities of a host of real and monetary variables....

Fixed exchange rates are less volatile than floating rates. But the volatility of macroeconomic variables such as money and output does not change very much across exchange rate regimes. This suggests that exchange rate models based only on macroeconomic fundamentals are unlikely to be very...

The ebb and flow of international capital since the nineteenth century illustrates recurring difficulties, as well as the alternative perspectives from which policymakers have tried to confront them. This paper is devoted to documenting these vicissitudes quantitatively and explaining them....