This paper analyzes competing interpretations for the large increases in the hoarding of international reserves by developing countries. While the first phase of the rapid hoarding of reserves in the aftermath of the East Asian crisis has been dominated by self insurance against exposure to...

This paper analyzes current stresses in the two key areas that concerned the architects of the original Bretton Woods system: international liquidity and exchange rate management. Despite radical changes since World War II in the market context for liquidity and exchange rate concerns, they...

This paper shows that the effect of capital account liberalization on growth depends upon the environment in which that policy occurs. A theoretical model demonstrates the possibility of an inverted-U shaped relationship between the responsiveness of growth to capital account liberalization and...

This paper extends the work of Kaminsky and Schmukler (2003) to the Baltic and Central Eastern European future Member States of the European Union, to test if the same short-run increase in cyclical volatility arising from financial integration is observed in this specific sample of “emerging...

We present a new empirical decomposition of the effects of financial liberalization on economic growth and on the incidence of crises. Our empirical estimates show that the direct effect of financial liberalization on growth by far outweighs the indirect effect via a higher propensity to crisis....

This paper addresses the issue of the optimal stock of international reserves in terms of a statistical model in which reserves affect both the probability of a Sudden Stop-as well as associated output costs-by reducing the balance-sheet effects of liability dollarization. Optimal reserves are...

This study examines whether pre-crisis international reserve accumulations, as well as exchange rate and reserve policy decisions made during the global financial crisis, can help to explain cross-country differences in post-crisis economic performance. Our approach focuses not only on the total...

Before the 1997-98 crisis, the East Asian economies—except for Japan—informally pegged their currencies to the dollar. These soft pegs made them vulnerable to a depreciating yen thereby aggravating the crisis. To limit future misalignments, the IMF wants East Asian currencies to float...

This paper uses micro-level data on mutual funds from different financial centers investing in equity and bonds to study how investors and managers behave and transmit shocks across countries. The paper finds that the volatility of mutual fund investments is driven quantitatively by both the...

We provide an overview of the recent developments of the literature on the determinants of long term capital flows, global imbalances and valuation effects. We present the main stylized facts of the new international financial landscape in which external balance sheets of countries have grown in...