This paper explains how mortgage market liberalization can introduce greater volatility in the housing market. It begins by documenting two stylized facts for OECD countries that models with perfect credit markets fail to explain: (i) housing investment is about five times as volatile as output...

We examine the empirical determinants of the demand for international reserves and compare the experiences of some Asian and Latin American economies. Our empirical results indicate that different vintages of the model of international reserves give different inferences about the appropriate...

In this paper we assess the effects of bond financing on firms' survival during the 1997-98 Asian crisis. Using a novel database covering the period 1995 to 2007 for five Asian economies most affected by the crisis - Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand - we find strong evidence...

This paper investigates the determinants of firms' decision to issue public debt in emerging Asian economies, using a novel database covering the period 1995 to 2007. We use comparable micro level panel of eight countries - China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and...

The value of China's currency, the renminbi (RMB), and the conduct of China's exchange rate policy have generated intense debate in academic and international policy circles. Despite the accumulation of empirical evidence regarding the degree of RMB misalignment over the past few years, the...

We examine the development of open macroeconomic policy choices among developing economies from the perspective of the powerful "trilemma" hypothesis. We construct an index of divergence of the three trilemma policy choices, and evaluate its patterns in recent decades. We find that the three...

The relationship between international payments and the real exchange rate¡Xthe "transfer problem"- is one of the classic questions in international economics. In this paper we use cross-country data on real exchange rates and a newly constructed data set on countries' net external positions to...

The optimal escape from a liquidity trap involves generating private-sector expectations of a higher future price level and higher future inflation. This lowers the real interest rate and reduces the recession during the liquidity trap. The problem, emphasized by Krugman, is that central-bank...

The study assesses the level of integration among the three Greater China economies (namely China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) and examines the suitability of a Greater China currency union. Currently, the three economies have extensive trade and investment linkages. Our analyses show that these...

Engel and Rogers (1996) find that crossing the US-Canada border can considerably raise relative price volatility and that exchange rate fluctuations explain about one-third of the volatility increase. In reevaluating the border effect, this study shows that cross-country heterogeneity in price...