Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s, the choice of the exchange rate regime has been the subject of a lively debate in international finance. In this study, we investigate the determinants of three exchange rate regimes (fixed, flexible and intermediate). Our...

To understand the consequences of the presence of international safety nets on governments' incentives to undertake reforms, we model IFIs´ interventions as country insurance policies. We find that country insurance (especially when made contingent on negative external shocks) is more likely...

I construct a micro-model to show that a currency crisis can spread from one country to another even when these countries are unrelated in terms of economic fundamentals and there is no capital linkage across countries through a common lender or an interbank market. The key to explaining...

This paper studies the implications of the presence of a large speculator like George Soros during a contagious currency crisis. The model proposes a new contagion channel and shows how a currency crisis can spread from one country to another even when these countries are totally unrelated in...

A common feature of numerous studies on early warning systems (EWS) of currency crisis is the use of an index of exchange market pressure, defined as a weighted average of the rate of depreciation, the monthly percentage changes in international reserves, and sometimes the inclusion of the...

This paper proposes a model encompassing alternative views of contagion by highlighting the different channels of transmission of financial crises in an unifying framework. We study investor behaviour when they are affected by external habit formation. It is shown how international portfolio...

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attack to the twin towers and ensuing heightened national security measures worldwide, but particularly in the United States, are modeled to be equivalent to a thickening of trade barriers in international trade. By estimating a gravity model with a stochastic...

This paper examines the issue of sustaining free trade when countries receive imperfect private information about each other’s non-tariff barriers. Because the countries can misrepresent their private belief about other countries’ protection levels, the punishment scheme to deter...

Abstract: The paper analyzes cyclical comovements in the Mercosur area differentiating idiosyncratic from common shocks. In the Mercosur (or any region for that matter) shocks can be country-specific, affecting only one country or a specific set of countries (for example, a weather-related...

Since the seminal work of Krugman (1979), product variety has played a central role in models of trade and growth. In spite of the general use of love-of-variety models, there has been no systematic study of how the import of new varieties has contributed to national welfare gains in the United...