Although oil price shocks have long been viewed as one of the leading candidates for explaining U.S. recessions, surprisingly little is known about the extent to which oil price shocks explain recessions. We provide a formal analysis of this question with special attention to the possible role...

In the chaotic financial environment of Asia in 1997-1998, daily changes in stock prices of about 10 percent became commonplace. This paper analyzes what type of news moves the markets in those days of market jitters. We find that movements are triggered by local and neighbor-country news, with...

Credit market imperfections have been blamed for the depth and persistence of the Great Depression in the USA. Could similar mechanisms have played a role in ending the East Asian miracle? After a brief account of the nature of the recent crises, we use a model of highly levered...

We assess links between China and the rest of emerging Asia. Some commentators have argued that China’s apparent devaluation in 1994 may have contributed to the Asian financial crisis. We argue that the devaluation was not economically important: The more-relevant exchange rate was a floating...

While it is clear that the volatility of asset returns is serially correlated, there is no general agreement as to the most appropriate parametric model for characterizing this temporal dependence. In this paper, we propose a simple way of modeling financial market volatility using high...

In this paper, we investigate the welfare implications of alternative financial market structures in a two-country endowment economy model. In particular, we obtain an analytic expression for the expected lifetime utility of the representative household when sovereign bonds are the only...

This paper describes the construction of a financial stress index. This stress index differs from other indexes in that it incorporates the co-movement and volatility of financial series as well as the levels of the series. Our index also uses past experience more than others to guide the...