The criteria of the theory of optimum currency areas suggest that many (most?) countries are not good candidates for either of the poles of genuinely fixed exchange rates or freely floating exchange rates. Thus many countries should have an interest in intermediate exchange rate regimes....

We show that the effects of inflation on growth change substantially as the inflation rate rises. Moreover the nonlinearities are quite different for industrial economies than for developing countries. We find that the threshold at which inflation first begins to seriously negatively affect...

There is considerable disagreement among analysts about the extent to which the spread of the Asian crisis was based on reasonable changes in expectations about fundamentals versus pure contagion effects resulting from imperfections in the behavior of currency and financial markets. In this...

This paper argues that while sources of potential discipline over domestic macro economic policies such as pegged exchange rates, high capital mobility, and IMF policy conditionality are commonly viewed as constraints, it is usually more productive to view them as influencing incentive...

Various claims have been made by economist and others as to what caused the Asian crisis, as well as what caused its spread through much of East Asia. Here, we perform some initial testing of four hypotheses, including the dominant role of portfolio investors and hedge funds in initiating and...