This paper presents an empirical analysis of speculative attacks on pegged exchange rates in 22 countries between 1967 and 1992. We define speculative attacks or crises as large movements in exchange rates, interest rates, and international reserves. We develop stylized facts concerning the...

In the event of large swings in world food prices, countries often intervene to dampen the impact of international food price spikes on domestic prices and to lessen the burden of adjustment on vulnerable population groups. While individual countries can succeed at insulating their domestic...

We analyze banking crises using a panel of macroeconomic and financial data for more than one hundred developing countries from 1975 through 1992. We find that banking crises in emerging markets are strongly associated with adverse external conditions. In particular Northern interest rates are...

This paper develops a new technique for measuring changes in the degree of capital mobility confronting a developing country that has restrictions on capital flows and official ceilings on domestic interest rates. Because such official controls rule out the use of traditional interest rate...

In this paper I argue that the international debt crisis of 1982 can best be understood as a prolonged negotiation between commercial banks and their own governments over who would bear the economic losses generated by loans made to developing countries. This interpretation of the debt crisis is...

It is now well documented that capital flight has been a dominant feature of capital movements between developing and industrial countries. Since 1988 reductions in the stock of flight capital more than account for private capital flows to emerging markets. This suggests that what appears to be...

This empirical study finds that while debt reduction and policy reforms in debtor countries have been important determinants of renewed access to international capital markets, changes in international interest rates have been the dominant factor. We calculate the effects of changes in...

This paper studies the effect of foreign aid on economic stabilization. Following Alesina and Drazen (1991), we model the delay in stabilizing as the result of a distributional struggle: reforms are postponed because they are costly and each distributional faction hopes to reduce its share of...

The finding of Feldstein and Horioka (1980) that countriesf investment rates are highly correlated with their national saving rates has by now been confirmed by many subsequent studies, even though their inference that international capital mobility nust be low has not been as widely accepted....

In many poor countries, the recent increases in prices of staple foods raise the real incomes of those selling food, many of whom are relatively poor, while hurting net food consumers, many of whom are also relatively poor. The impacts on poverty will certainly be very diverse, but the average...