Are countries with unregulated capital flows more vulnerable to currency crises? Efforts to answer this question properly must control for "self selection" bias since countries with liberalized capital accounts may also have more sound economic policies and institutions that make them less...

A large literature on the appropriate sequencing of financial liberalization suggests that removing capital controls prematurely may contribute to currency instability. This paper investigates whether legal restrictions on international capital flows are associated with greater currency...

Japanese official intervention in the foreign exchange market is of by far the largest magnitude in the world, despite little or no evidence that it is effective in moving exchange rates. Up until recently, however, official data on intervention has not been available for Japan. This paper...

This paper investigates the output effects of IMF-supported stabilization programs, especially those introduced at the time of a severe balance of payments/currency crisis. Using a panel data set over the 1975–1997 period and covering 67 developing and emerging market economies (with 461 IMF...

Sudden Stops are the simultaneous occurrence of a currency/balance of payments crisis with a reversal in capital flows (Calvo, 1998). We investigate the output effects of financial crises in emerging markets, focusing on whether sudden-stop crises are a unique phenomenon and whether they entail...

We investigate the effects of IMF stabilization programs, and the reasons behind the unusually high IMF activity and relatively low program completion rates in Latin America. We base our tests on a panel, and distinguish between IMF program approvals and completion. We find that Latin America...

We investigate the output effects of severe banking and currency crises in emerging markets, focusing on whether “twin crises” (simultaneous occurrence of currency and banking crises) exist as a unique phenomenon and whether they entail especially large losses. Recent literature, mostly...

Since the East Asian crises of 1997, a number of East Asian economies have allowed greater exchange rate flexibility and abandoned monetary targets in favor of inflation targeting, apparently because the perceived usefulness of money as a predictor of inflation, i.e. the information content of...

Restrictions on international capital transactions and other payments are usually designed to limit volatile short-term capital flows ("hot money") and stabilize the exchange rate. Their imposition, however, may have the opposite effect by inadvertently signaling the continuation of...

Are countries with unregulated capital flows more vulnerable to currency crises? Efforts to answer this question properly must control for "self selection" bias since countries with liberalized capital accounts may also have more sound economic policies and institutions that make them less...