The paper reviews recent trends in thinking on exchange rate regimes. It begins by classifying countries into regimes, noting the distinction between de facto and de jure regimes, but also noting the low correlation among proposed ways of classifying the latter. The advantages of fixed exchange...

This paper considers policies of the industrialized countries, as they pertain to crises in emerging markets. These fall into three areas: (1) their own macroeconomic policies, which determine the global financial environment; (2) their role in responding to crises when they occur, particularly...

We use a panel of annual data for over one hundred developing countries from 1971 through 1992 to characterize currency crashes. We define a currency crash as a large change of the nominal exchange rate that is also a substantial increase in the rate of change of nominal depreciation. We examine...

The paper examines interest rates in nine Latin American and East Asian countries during the period 1987-1994. The goal is to discover why interest rates have remained high, failing to converge to U.S. levels, despite capital market liberalization and a resurgence of portfolio capital inflows...

"Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes and life expectancies as unequal as they are today? For want of sufficient data, these questions have not yet been answered. This paper infers inequality for 14 ancient, pre-industrial societies using...