This paper documents a set of new stylized facts about leverage and financial fragility for emerging market firms following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Corporate debt vulnerability indicators during the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) attributed to corporate financial roots provide a...

The 1990s Sudden Stops in emerging markets were a harbinger for the 2008 global financial crisis. During Sudden Stops, countries lost access to credit, causing abrupt current account reversals, and suffered Great Recessions. This paper reviews a class of models that yields quantitative...

This paper provides an asymmetric information analysis of the recent East Asian crisis. It then outlines several lessons from this crisis. First, there is a strong rationale for an international lender of last resort. Second, without appropriate conditionality for this lending, the moral hazard...

Using daily data during the period of Asian Currency Crises, this paper examines high-frequency contagion effects among Asian six countries. By identifying the origin' (of exchange rate depreciation, or decline in stock prices) and the affected' (currencies, or stock prices) in spillover...

We survey three distinct types of financial crises which took place in the 1990s and the 2000s: 1) the credit implosion leading to severe banking crisis in Japan; 2) The foreign reserves' meltdown triggered by foreign hot money flight from frothy economies with fixed exchange rate regimes of...

This paper investigates the potential impacts of the degree of divergence in open macroeconomic policies in the context of the trilemma hypothesis. Using an index that measures the relative policy divergence among the three trilemma policy choices, namely monetary independence, exchange rate...

Emerging markets do not handle adverse shocks well. In this paper, we lay out an argument about why emerging markets are so fragile, and why they may adopt contractual mechanisms -such as a dollarized banking system- that increase their fragility. We draw on this analysis to explain why...

Although internal policy mismanagements can be cited in most recent emerging market crises, they seldom account fully for the severity of these crises. The reluctance of international investors to provide the resources that would limit the extent of the reversal almost invariably plays a key...

In fighting a financial crisis, opacity (keeping the names of banks borrowing at emergency lending facilities secret) and stigma (the cost of having a bank's name revealed) are desirable to restore confidence. Lending facilities raise the perceived average quality of all banks' assets. Opacity...