More frequent and increasingly severe crises are encouraging emerging market economies to seek means to make themselves less vulnerable to sudden stops in capital flows. Capital controls have been widely discussed, but dollarization may offer a longer-term and more market-friendly solution.

In a recent paper, we studied economic growth and inflation at different levels of government and external debt. The public discussion of our empirical strategy and results has been somewhat muddled. Here, we attempt to clarify matters, particularly with respect sample coverage (our evidence...

Predicting the timing of currency and banking crises is likely to remain an elusive task for academics, financial market participants, and policymakers. Few foresaw the Asian crises and fewer still could have imagined their severity. However, recent events have highlighted the importance of...

Given all the ambiguities about the outcomes of the financial liberalization process, it is relevant to ask what the systematic, cross-country evidence reveals on several questions, including: What happens to key macroeconomic and variables following domestic and external financial...

In this paper we present evidence that capital account reversals have become more severe for emerging markets. Because policy options are limited in the midst of a capital market crisis and because so many countries have already had crises recently, we focus on some of the policies that could...

Using annual data for Colombia over the last 30 years, we test competing theories that explain macroeconomic fluctuations: the neoclassical synthesis, which posits that in the presence of temporary price rigidity, an unanticipated monetary expansion produces output gains that erode over time...

Capital inflows can be a mixed blessing, especially in economies with thin domestic financial markets and when driven by investors with a short-term focus. Many levers of policy can be applied to resist the effects of the inflows. One that has been widely relied upon has been currency...

This paper highlights the findings of some of the recent research on capital flows, credit booms, and their attendant consequences for asset prices, business cycles, financial crises and the interaction among these. The aim is to condense key results from the relevant literature and promote...

This paper presents evidence on the behavior of output and inflation in the transition economies during 1992-95. A regression analysis explores the differences in output performance across the transition economies during this period. The paper then engages in a numerical, somewhat speculative,...

This paper analyzes the growth and stabilization experience in 26 transition economies in eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Mongolia for the period 1989-1994. Inflation rates have declined significantly in most countries following an inflation stabilization program. Growth resumes...