Sovereign credit ratings play an important part in determining countries’ access to international capital markets and the terms of that access. In principle, there is no reason to expect that sovereign credit ratings should systematically predict currency crises. In practice, however, in...

Given all the ambiguities about the outcomes of the financial liberalization process, it is relevant to ask what the systematic, cross-country evidence reveals on several questions, including: What happens to key macroeconomic and variables following domestic and external financial...

With many emerging market currencies tied to the U.S. dollar either implicitly or explicitly, movements in the exchange values of the currencies of major countries have the potential to influence the competitive position of many developing countries. According to some analysts, establishing...

This paper examines the argument for a G-3 exchange rate target zone strictly from an emerging market perspective. A commitment to damping G-3 exchange rate fluctuations, however, requires a willingness on the part of G-3 authorities to use domestic monetary policy to that end. Under a system of...

Traditional specifications of money demand have been commonly plagued by persistent overprediction, implausible parameter estimates, and highly autocorrelated errors. This paper argues that some of those problems stem from the failure to account for the impact of financial innovation. We...

The role of the international commodity market in transmitting disturbances is considered in a model that incorporates commodities as an input in production. The analysis employs a three-country framework: a liquidity-constrained commodity supplier and two industrial countries that import the...

In this paper we present evidence that capital account reversals have become more severe for emerging markets. Because policy options are limited in the midst of a capital market crisis and because so many countries have already had crises recently, we focus on some of the policies that could...

Este trabajo presenta un análisis teórico y empirico de las politicas dirigidas a alcanzar un nivel más depreciado de la tasa de carnbio real. Un modelo de optimización intertemporal sugiere que, en ausencia de cambios en la politica fiscal, un nivel más depreciado de la tasa de carnbio...

This paper develops an extended version of the Solow (1956) growth model in which total factor productivity is assumed a function of two important externalities viz., learning by doing and openness to trade. Using this framework we show that these externalities have played an important role to...

During the past decade a number of countries imposed capital controls that had two distinguishing features: they were asymmetric, in that they were designed principally to discourage capital inflows, and they were temporary. This paper studies formally the consequences of these policies,...