This paper examines the international financial relations of the interwar period to see what light this experience sheds on current concerns over international policy coordination. The analysis proceeds in three parts. The first part considers the role for policy coordination as viewed by...

This paper synthesizes previous studies analyzing the effects of capital account liberalization on industry growth while controlling for financial crises, domestic financial development and the strength of institutions. We find reasonably strong evidence that financial openness has positive...

This Paper reconsiders the 1992/3 crisis in the European Monetary System in light of its emerging market successors. That episode was a predecessor of the Mexican and Asian crises in the sense that both capital movements and domestic financial fragility played important roles. The output effects...

We show that the variables pointed to by the theory of optimum currency areas (OCAs) help to explain patterns of exchange rate variability and intervention across countries. But OCA considerations affect exchange market pressures and intervention in different ways. Exchange market pressures...

This paper analyses the extent to which ASEAN may be suitable for a regional monetary arrangement. On the economic front, we review evidence on patterns of trade, economic shocks, the extent of factor mobility, and the monetary transmission mechanism. We find that ASEAN today is less suitable...

Important questions concerning the structure and operation of a European Central Bank remain unanswered. Although there exists no precedent for the process of institution-building in which the European Community is currently engaged, the founding and early operations of the Federal Reserve...

Recent years have seen a wave of empirical studies attempting to give empirical content to the theory of optimum currency areas as a way of marshalling evidence on the costs and benefits of EMU. This paper reviews this empirical literature, as a way of examining the success with which theory has...

How did the Subprime Crisis, a problem in a small corner of U.S. financial markets, affect the entire global banking system? To shed light on this question we use principal components analysis to identify common factors in the movement of banks' credit default swap spreads. We find that fortunes...

We use data on the extent to which residents of one country hold the bonds of issuers resident in another as a measure of financial integration or interrelatedness, asking how Asia compares with Europe and Latin America and with the base case in which the purchaser and issuer of the bonds reside...