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...

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...

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...

Following the real appreciation of the US dollar in the first half of the 1980s, travel expenditures in the current account soared. Employing standard regression techniques as well as Markov-switching regime analysis we show that such expenditures did not return to their pre- appreciation levels...

Transitions to floating exchange rate regimes have led to sharp increases in exchange rate volatilities with no corresponding changes in the distribution of macroeconomic fundamentals. In the spirit of Dornbusch (1976), we assess whether nominal exchange rate overshooting is responsible for this...

We investigate convergence towards Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) within the Euro Zone and between the Euro Zone and its main partners using panel data methods that incorporate serial and contemporaneous correlation. We find strong rejections of the unit root hypothesis, and therefore evidence of...

This paper describes the Federal Reserve's analytical framework under Volcker and Greenspan, as it was constructed in the early 1980s, during a period of high inflation. It traces the modeling and policy implications of this framework. It discusses the Fed's actual track record and the state of...

This paper tests the relative version of purchasing power parity (PPP) for a set of ten Asian developing countries using panel cointegration framework. We employ 'between-dimension' dynamic OLS estimator as proposed by Pedroni (2001b). The test results overwhelmingly reject the PPP hypothesis.

We study the price adjustment practices and provide quantitative measurement of the managerial and customer costs of price adjustment using data from a large U.S. industrial manufacturer and its customers. We find that price adjustment costs are a much more complex construct than the existing...

We study the behavior of real exchange rates in a two­country dynamic equilibrium model. In this model, consumers can only consume domestic goods but can invest costlessly in capital stocks of both countries. Nevertheless, transporting goods between the two countries is costly and, hence, the...