In his seminal 1960 article Robert Mundell proposed a model of balance-of-payments crises in which confidence in the continuation of a currency peg depended on the observed holdings of central bank foreign reserves. We examine the implications of a reformulation of this view from the perspective...

The current account reversals, large recessions, and price collapses that define Sudden Stops contradict the predictions of a large class of models in which the current account is a vehicle for consumption smoothing and investment financing. This paper shows that the quantitative predictions of...

The 1990s emerging-markets crises were characterized by sudden reversals in inflows of foreign capital followed by unusually large declines in current account deficits, private expenditures, production, and prices of nontradable goods relative to tradables. This paper shows that these Sudden...

Fluctuations in real GNP have traditionally been viewed as transitory deviations from a deterministic time trend. The purpose of this paper is to review some of the recent developments that have led to a new view of output fluctuations and then to provide some additional evidence. Using post-war...

According to the conventional view of the business cycle, fluctuations in output represent temporary deviations from trend. The purpose of this paper is to question this conventional view. If fluctuations in output are dominated by temporary deviations from the natural rate of output, then an...

We develop a framework to assess how successfully standard times eries models explain low-frequency variability of a data series. The low-frequency information is extracted by computing a finite number of weighted averages of the original data, where the weights are low-frequency trigonometric...

While this is typically ignored, the properties of the stochastic process followed by aggregate consumption affect the estimates of the costs of fluctuations. This paper pursues two approaches to modelling aggregate consumption dynamics and to measuring how much society dislikes fluctuations,...

We develop analytic asymptotic methods to characterize time series properties of nonlinear dynamic stochastic models. We focus on a stochastic growth model which is representative of the models underlying much of modern macroeconomics. Taking limits as the stochastic shocks become small, we...