Indicators of financial crisis generally do not have a good track record. This paper presents an early warning system (EWS) for six countries in Asia in which indicators do work. Our binary choice model, which has been estimated for the period 1970:01–2001.12, has the following features. We...

Indicators of financial crisis generally do not have a good track record. This paper presents an early warning system for six countries in Asia, in which indicators do work.We distinguish three types of financial crises, currency crises, banking crises and debt crises, and extract four groups of...

From 1995 to 2001 Russia witnessed an asset market boom, a deep financial crisis, and a surprisingly forceful recovery. This paper analyzes economic policy and data of the time to explain why fluctuations were so violent and to draw lessons for Emerging Markets investors as well as for...

The financial turmoil that hit Russia in August 1998, was extremely confusing to many foreign observers working in Russia. It was astonishing to see a country that seemed on its way to prosperity suddenly experiencing an economic meltdown. As part of my work, I was often asked to provide...

The paper discusses and revisits some of the most popular stories behind the 2001 financial crisis in Argentina, i.e. the prolonged overvaluation of the peso owing to the Currency Board arrangement, the lack of fiscal adjustment, and the negative external environment which triggered a “sudden...

This paper develops a new model of international private debt financing. It shows the possibility of discontinuity in the amount of financial intermediation when the intermediary is inefficient. The model suggests a mechanism that can generate the following sequence of events: A period of...

The main objective of this paper is to study the relationship between external public debt and equilibrium real exchange rate in developing countries. Using a extension of Obstfeld & Rogoff (1995) model we show that debt overhang tend to appreciate real exchange rate in the long run (Krugman...

This paper investigates empirically whether there is a negative relationship between a country’s risk premium and the balance sheet effect, as implied by recent theories emphasizing financial imperfections. We find evidence that balance sheet effects, stemming from the increase in the external...

This paper compares alternative estimates of systemic time-varying excess returns for the Irish pound and the Spanish peseta, against the German mark, since 1985. We make use of progressively more complex models, going from the GARCH in Mean specification, to the International Capital Asset...

This paper builds upon the empirical literature on the macroeconomic impact of real exchange rate depreciations for a sample of 27 emerging economies. We find that real exchange rate depreciations tend to increase a country’s risk premium. This effect is neither linear nor symmetric: large...