Emerging market crises are characterized by large swings in both macroeconomic fundamentals and asset prices. The economic significance of observed movements in macroeconomic variables is obscured by the brief and extreme nature of crises. In this paper we propose to study the macroeconomic...

We show the existence of a very short-term relationship at the daily frequency between changes in the price of a country's major commodity export price and changes in its nominal exchange rate. The relationship appears to be robust and to hold when we use contemporaneous (realized) commodity...

This paper examines the value of connections between German industry and the Nazi movement in early 1933. Drawing on previously unused contemporary sources about management and supervisory board composition and stock returns, we find that one out of seven firms, and a large proportion of the...

We derive an international asset pricing model that assumes local investors have preferences of the type "keeping up with the Joneses." In an international setting investors compare their current wealth with that of their peers who live in the same country. In the process of inferring the...

This paper offers empirical evidence that a country's choice of exchange rate regime can have a signifficant impact on its medium-term rate of productivity growth. Moreover, the impact depends critically on the country's level of financial development, its degree of market regulation, and its...

The first generation models of currency crises have often been criticized because they predict that, in the absence of very large triggering shocks, currency attacks should be predictable and lead to small devaluations. This paper shows that these features of first generation models are not...

This paper proposes a dynamic framework to study the timing of balance of payments crises. The model incorporates two main ingredients: (i) investors have private information; (ii)investors interact in a dynamic setting, weighing the high returns on domestic assets against the incentives to pull...

We study the extent of macroeconomic convergence/divergence among euro area countries. Our analysis focuses on four variables (unemployment, inflation, relative prices and the current account), and seeks to uncover the role played by monetary union as a convergence factor by using non-euro...

This paper describes the stylized facts characterizing periods of exceptionally large capital inflows in a sample of 70 middle- and high-income countries over the last 35 years. We identify 155 episodes of large capital inflows, and we find that these events are typically accompanied by an...