This paper examines mean reversion in real effective exchange rates in six leading Latin American economies during the XXth century using a new data set. A unit-root approach is complemented by an error-correction model including key fundamentals such as terms of trade, trade openness and...

We analyze the way in which Latin American countries have adjusted to commodity terms of trade (CTOT) shocks in the 1970–2007 period. Specifically, we investigate the degree to which the active management of international reserves and exchange rates impacted the transmission of international...

Popular perception is that emerging market economies (EMEs), and Asian Pacific Rim countries—China, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam (RIMs)—in particular, have been rapidly accumulating reserves, perhaps beyond what is justified by precautionary motives. This...

We test the hypothesis that net foreign asset positions are consistent with external solvency and examine the dynamics of external adjustment using data for 50 countries over the 1970–2006 period. Our analysis adapts Bohn's (2007) error-correction reaction function approach – which tests...

We examine how membership in a currency union affects public debt sustainability and market assessments of default risk in eurozone countries. We argue that there exist offsetting effects: expectations of bailouts tend to make a given level of debt more sustainable, lowering bond yields and CDS...

We investigate how “news” affected domestic interest spreads vis-à-vis Germany and how it propagated to other countries during the recent crisis period, thereby distinguishing between the so-called GIIPS countries and other European countries. We make original use of the Eurointelligence...

1985 saw the publication of Carlos Díaz-Alejandro's classic article, “Good-Bye Financial Repression, Hello Financial Crash” (1985). Writing in the wake of drastic financial blowups in the Southern Cone, Díaz-Alejandro nonetheless argued that “a believable alternative system could be...

This paper examines the role of cross-sectional heterogeneity for estimating the euro's effect on euro-area trade. In the empirical analysis, the impact of trade costs on trade and the transition dynamics to the new monetary regime can vary cross-sectionally in trade sectors and country pairs....

This paper assesses the changes in the regional capital mobility in China during the period of economic reform in 1978–2008 by employing a panel time varying coefficient (TVP) model. This approach is much more suitable to model China's evolution in the regional capital mobility than a standard...

We explore the stability of the conditioning variables accounting for the real estate valuation before and after the crisis of 2008–9, in a panel of 36 countries, recognizing the crisis break. We validate the robustness of the association between the real estate valuation and lagged current...