The thrust of current deposit insurance reform--risk-based insurance premiums and capital requirements--is an effort to price deposit insurance more fairly. Fairly pricing deposit insurance eliminates inequitable wealth transfers, but it does not lead to an efficient equilibrium. This paper...

After faithfully maintaining a fixed exchange rate and fully convertible currency for almost a decade Argentina still pays higher interest rates on peso denominated debt than on US dollar denominated debt. The interest rate spread is the price of keeping the option to devalue alive. Argentina...

When a country abandons a fixed, or target zone exchange regime it usually claims that the regime was "fundamentally" sound but that it was undermined by pernicious speculation. The validity of the claim is impossible to assess using only observable data-there always exists a future path of...

This paper presents a test of the relationship between financial asset values and the fundamentals. The test is an indirect test based on Tobin's (1969) q model of investment. The advantage of this test is that it avoids conditioning on a specific model of equilibrium returns by substituting an...