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...

In recent years, the IMF has released a growing number of reports and other documents covering economic and financial developments and trends in member countries. Each report, prepared by a staff team after discussions with government officials, is published at the option of the member country.

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....

Uruguay has experienced a remarkable recovery since the 2002 crisis, supported by sound policies and favorable external conditions. With the framework put in place in 2002, Uruguay abandoned an exchange rate peg in favor of a free float, adoped a monetary regime initially based on money targets,...

In just over a decade after independence, the three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, have transformed themselves into fully functioning, small open-market economies that will be joining the European Union. Capital Markets and Financial Intermediation in The Baltics analyzes the...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the welfare gains from financial integration for developing and emerging market economies. To do so, we build a stochastic endogenous growth model for a small open economy that can (i) borrow from the rest of the world, (ii) invest in foreign assets, and...