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...

Considerable attention has been paid to the possibility that large-scale IMF-led financing packages may have distorted incentives in international financial markets, leading private investors to provide more credit to emerging market countries, and at lower interest rates, than might otherwise...

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...

The lessons from the 1994-95 Mexican peso crisis are examined from the perspective of creditors and their markets, countries that are recipients of large capital inflows, and the functioning of the international system as a whole. From each of these perspectives, recent changes in the financial...

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 addresses the popular view that differences in financial development explain the pattern of global current account imbalances. One strain of thinking explains the net flow of capital from developing to industrial economies on the basis of the industrial economies' more advanced...

This paper analyzes exchange rate turmoil with a Markov Switching GARCH model. We distinguish between two different regimes in both the conditional mean and the conditional variance: "ordinary" regime, characterized by low exchange rate changes and low volatility, and "turbulent" regime,...