In July 1944, representatives of the Allied nations gathered in BrettonWoods, New Hampshire and signed an agreement to rebuild the internationalmonetary system. From 1946 until August 15, 1971, major currencies were fixed tothe US dollar, and the dollar was, at the same time, convertible to gold...

This Article, a sequel to earlier articles by the author on financial regulation and global finance, retrieves and updates J. M. Keynes’s original International Clearing Union plan for what ultimately became the International Monetary Fund (“IMF,” “Fund”).  Its motives are not...

This thesis seeks to develop an alternative conceptual framework through which to understand international finance. It then applies this framework to the case of China’s recent official foreign exchange accumulation. One view of international financial relations suggests an agendaof...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of the Bank of Japan's official interventions on the JPY/USD parity during the period 1992–2004. The novelty of our approach is to combine two recent advances of the empirical literature on foreign exchange interventions: (i) drawing on...

The goal of this text is to set forth sector-specific recommendations to provide future international trade and investment rules for banking, securities, and insurance.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to model the components of credit risk in primary debt markets and evaluate changes in these factors in times of crisis. Design/methodology/approach - The authors use a unique dataset consisting of nearly 163,000 new loans and bond issues in the USA and...

This paper investigates the Purchasing Power Parity Theory (PPP) in the context of possible nonlinear relationships between prices and exchange rates of three key currencies. The main contribution of this paper is testing for nonlinearities and nonlinear relationships in a framework of...

This paper analyzes the origins of currency crises for 20 OECD countries and South Africa from 1970 through 1998. The main contributions are in three areas. First, it tests for contagious crises and attempts to recognize contagion channels by employing a duration analysis. Second, to minimize...

Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience...

This paper surveys the foreign exchange markets, money and secondary government security markets, and stock exchanges in 107 smaller economy countries. The underdevelopment of these markets impedes risk transfer, monetary policy, corporate financing, and the capacity to absorb capital inflows....