Changes in the price of nontradable goods relative to tradable goods account for roughly 50 percent of the cyclical movements in real exchange rates

The recent Asian currency crisis was caused by large prospective fiscal deficits associated with implicit bailout guarantees to failing banking systems. Absent the political will to raise taxes or cut spending, governments must resort to seignorage revenues to pay for the bailout of the banking...

This paper addresses two questions: (i) how do governments actually pay for the fiscal costs associated with currency crises; and (ii) what are the implications of different fi­nancing methods for post-crisis rates of inflation and depreciation? We study these questions using a general...

This Paper studies the behaviour of inflation after nine large post-1990 contractionary devaluations. A salient feature of the data is that inflation is low relative to the rate of devaluation. We argue that distribution costs and substitution away from imports to lower quality local goods can...

This paper proposes a theory of twin banking-currency crises in which both fundamentals and self-fulfilling beliefs play crucial roles. Fundamentals determine whether crises will occur. Self-fulfilling beliefs determine when they occur. The fundamental that causes ‘twin crises’ is government...

This paper argues that the recent Southeast Asian currency crises was caused by large prospective deficits associated with implicit bailout guarantees to failing banking systems. We articulate this view using a simple dynamic general equilibrium model whose key feature is that a speculative...

High-interest-rate currencies tend to appreciate relative to low-interest-rate currencies. We argue that adverse-selection problems between participants in foreign exchange markets can account for this `forward premium puzzle.' The key feature of our model is that the adverse selection problem...

This paper studies the behavior of inflation after nine large post-1990 contractionary devaluations. A salient feature of the data is that inflation is low relative to the rate of devaluation. We argue that the distribution costs and substitution away from imports to lower quality local goods...

This paper explores the implications of different strategies for financng the fiscal costs of twin crises for inflation and depreciation rates. We use a first-generation type model of speculative attacks which has four key features: (i) the crisis is triggered by prospective deficits; (ii) there...

Large devaluations are generally associated with large declines in real exchange rates. We develop a model which embodies two complementary forces that account for the large declines in the real exchange rate that occur in the aftermath of large devaluations. The first force is sticky...