When the U.S. economy sneezes, do emerging markets catch a cold? We show that economic news, and not just monetary policy, in the United States affects financial conditions in emerging markets. News about U.S. employment has the strongest effects, followed by news about economic activity and...

This paper, using T-GARCH models, finds that the United States has been the major source of price and volatility spillovers to stock markets in the Asian region during three different periods in the last decade: the pre-Long Term Capital Management crisis period the tech bubble period, and the...

Since the Australian dollar was floated in December 1983, the Australian central bank (Reserve Bank of Australia) has actively intervened in the foreign exchange market. Using daily exchange rate and official intervention data from January 1984 to December 2001, this paper examines what effects,...

There is ample empirical evidence for developed economies that asset prices contain information about future economic developments. But is this also the case in transition economies? Using a panel of monthly data for the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, and Slovenia for the...

In distilling a vast literature spanning the rational — irrational divide, this paper offers reflections on why asset bubbles continue to threaten economic stability despite financial markets becoming more informationally-efficient, more complete, and more heavily influenced by sophisticated...

This paper utilizes a new dataset of foreign and domestic mutual funds in Mexico to assess their behavior and obtains three new findings. First, foreign mutual funds are more sensitive to global financial conditions and engage more in herding and positive feedback trading than domestic mutual...

In the past few years there has been a large increase in portfolio capital flows into emerging markets, mostly fueled by mutual funds and other institutional investors. Based on a simple variance ratio test, this paper finds that emerging stock markets as a group experienced a sharp increase in...

Using symmetric data sets of 92 weekly return observations before and after the introduction of the euro, the paper analyzes the impact of the new currency on the return structure of equity markets in the European Monetary Union. Variance decompositions, cluster analyses, and principle component...

This paper describes a corporate sector vulnerability indicator, the expected number of defaults (END), based on the joint occurrence of defaults among a number of firms and/or institutions. The END indicator is general enough to assess systemic risk in the corporate and financial sectors, as...

Bid-ask spreads for Asian emerging market currencies increased sharply during the Asian crisis. A key question is whether such wide spreads were excessive or explained by models of bid-ask spreads. Precrisis estimates of standard models show that spreads during the crisis were in most cases...