Much has been written about prospects for U.S. current account adjustment, including the possibility of what is sometimes referred to as a "disorderly correction": a sharp fall in the exchange rate that boosts interest rates, depresses stock prices, and weakens economic activity. This paper...

Considerable research has focused on explaining why currencies appreciate in real terms after the nominal exchange rate is stabilized, but this research generally has taken a theoretical approach, and rarely has tested its hypotheses empirically. In this paper I estimate a simple...

This paper examines the question of how the path of real GDP in four important Latin American countries, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico, might have differed if the sharp run-up in borrowing during the late 1970s and early 1980s had not occurred. Specifically, we ask whether these countries...

This paper surveys the development and operation of the parallel exchange market in Argentina during the 1980s, and evaluates its impact upon macroeconomic performance and policy. The historical evolution of Argentina's exchange market policies is reviewed in order to understand the government's...

The paper surveys a broad array of data to compare the scope and impact of three emerging-market financial crises: the debt crisis of the 1980s, the Mexican financial crisis of 1994-95, and the current international financial crisis. While certain conventional views regarding the three episodes...

In the past few years, observers increasingly have pointed to China as a source of downward pressure on global prices. This paper evaluates the theoretical and empirical evidence bearing on the question of whether China's buoyant export growth has led to significant changes in the inflation...

In recent years, a number of studies have analyzed the experiences of a broad range of industrial economies during periods when their current account deficits have narrowed. Such studies identified systematic aspects of external adjustment, but it is unclear how good a guide the experience of...

Analyses of the possible contractionary effects of exchange rate devaluation typically assume the foreign exchange market to be unified, thereby ignoring the large fraction of transactions taking place in the black market for foreign exchange that exist in many developing countries. This paper...

In this paper we develop a modified "early warning system" (EWS) approach to identifying the roles of domestic and external factors in Latin America's crises. Several probit models of balance-of-payments crises, based on different identified sets of crisis dates, were estimated for six Latin...

This paper addresses a phenomenon often noted in association with programs aimed at stabilizing high rates of inflation: a rise in the ex post real interest rate following implementation of the disinflation strategy. Such increases have been observed in connection with the stopping of European...