Currency crises tend to be regional; they affect countries in geographic proximity. This suggests that patterns of international trade are important in understanding how currency crises spread, above and beyond any macroeconomic phenomena. We provide empirical support for this hypothesis. Using...

Both the literature and new empirical evidence show that exchange rate regimes differ primarily by the noisiness of the exchange rate, not by measurable macroeconomic fundamentals. This motivates a theoretical analysis of exchange rate regimes with noise traders. The presence of noise traders...

We use a panel of annual data for over one hundred developing countries from 1971–92 to characterize currency crashes. We define a currency crash as a large change of the nominal exchange rate that is also a substantial increase in the rate of change of nominal depreciation. We examine the...

This paper is concerned with the fact that the incidence of speculative attacks tend to be temporally correlated; that is, currency crises appear to pass ‘contagiously’ from one country to another. The paper provides a survey of the theoretical literature, and analyses the contagious nature of...

A three-sector macromodel of China’s economy is developed, in which the activity of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is constrained by the state-imposed credit plan for working capital. Our analysis indicates the weakness of credit control and interest rate variation as anti-inflationary tools....

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 20 industrialized countries from 1959 through 1993, I examine the volatilities of a host of real and monetary variables. Graphical...

For an international sample of banks, we construct measures of a bank’s absolute size and its systemic size defined as size relative to the national economy. We then examine how a bank’s risk and return, its activity mix and funding strategy, and the extent to which it faces market...

Over the last two centuries, many countries experienced regime transitions toward democracy. We document this democratic transition over a long time horizon. We use historical time series of income, education and democracy levels from 1870 to 2000 to explore the economic factors associated with...