Emerging European countries have made large strides in developing their local capital markets since the early-1990s. However, the rate of development has been widely disparate across countries and market segments, underpinned by the varying degrees of progress made in key areas such as...

We present empirical evidence that the Thai baht's value is driven in part by investors' cross-border equity portfolio rebalancing decisions. Our results are based on comprehensive datasets of FX and stock market transactions undertaken by nonresident investors in Thailand in 2005 and 2006....

The economic literature has long attributed non-zero expected excess returns in currency markets to time-varying risk premiums demanded by risk-averse investors. This paper, building on Bacchetta and van Wincoop's (2021) portfolio balance framework, shows that such returns can also arise when...

During 2001-07, increases in mature market volatility were associated with declines in forex returns for East Asian countries, consistent with an overall ""flight to safety"" effect. Estimates from GARCH models suggest that a 5 percentage point increase in mature market equity volatility...

Many sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries liberalized their economies in the 1980s and early 1990s. This paper reviews the foreign exchange regime reforms in selected SSA, and their associated macroeconomic policies and economic performance during and after these reforms were undertaken. Before...

Since the turn of the century, aid flows to Africa have increased on average and become more volatile. As a result, policymakers, particularly in post-stabilization countries where inflation has only recently been brought under control, have been increasingly preoccupied with how best to deploy...

Conventional wisdom states that currency depreciation in oil-producing countries are contractionary because demand effects, limited by the prevalence of oil exports priced in dollars, are more than offset by adverse supply effects. Iran, however, has experienced a rapid increase in non-oil...

Currency boards operate differently from standard pegs. The former exhibit greater currency stability and lower transaction costs, inflation, and nominal interest rates, but are limited in their use of devaluation. We extend Drazen and Masson’s (1994) signaling model to consider the choice...

We focus on the management of highly persistent shocks to aid flows, including PRSP-related increases in net inflows, in three “post-stabilization.” African economies with de jure flexible exchange rates. Such shocks have beneficent long-run effects, but when currency substitution is high...