Before the crisis of 1997-98, the East Asian economies except for Japan but including China pegged their currencies to the U.S. dollar. To avoid further turmoil, the IMF now argues that these currencies should float more freely. However, our econometric estimations show that the dollar's...

Since the end of the Great Recession, growth in health care spending has declined to historically low levels. There is disagreement over whether this decline was caused by falling incomes during the Great Recession (and therefore is likely to reverse once the recovery is complete) or whether the...

We estimate a workhorse dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with an occasionally binding borrowing constraint. First, we propose a new specification of the occasionally binding constraint, where the transition between the unconstrained and constrained states is a stochastic...

This paper studies whether the volume and composition of capital flows affect the degree of credit crunch during the 2007-2009 crisis. Using data on 3823 firms in 24 emerging countries, we find that, on average, the decline in stock prices was more severe for firms that are intrinsically more...

In this paper we explore the ‘Mrs. Machlup's Wardrobe' hypothesis to understand the growing trend of Latin American economies amassing large stocks of international reserves. Using annual data from 1980 to 2007, we examine the relevance of the argument that economies continue to add to their...

The European and Asian financial crises are the two most recent major regional crises. This paper compares their origins and evolution. The origins of the two sets of crises were different in some respects, but broadly similar. The two sets of crises also shared similarities in their evolution,...

Recent macroeconomic experience has drawn attention to the importance of interdependence among countries through financial markets and institutions, independently of traditional trade linkages. This paper develops a model of the international transmission of shocks due to interdependent...

Latin American performance during the global financial crisis was unprecedented. Many developing and emerging countries successfully weathered the worst crisis since the Great Depression. Was it good luck? Was it good policies? In this paper we compare growth during the Asian and global...

We have documented a regime change in the U.S. Treasury market post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC). We first derived bounds on Treasury yields that account for dealer balance sheet costs, which we call the net short and net long curves. We show that actual Treasury yields moved from the net short...

This paper analyses the impact of the global financial crisis on euro area cross-border financial flows by comparing recent developments with the main pre-crisis trends. Two prominent features of the period of turmoil were (i) the sizeable deleveraging of external financial exposures by the...