A popular strategy for estimating output gaps is to anchor them to structural economic relationships. The resulting output gaps, however, are often highly sensitive to numerous auxiliary assumptions inherent in the approach. This complicates their use in policymaking. We illustrate the point...

This paper presents an analysis of capital market integration grounded in the intertemporal model of the current account. The model is extended to encompass liquidity constraints and fitted to data for euro-area countries and Italian and Canadian regions. With respect to capital mobility,...

This paper addresses the important question of how far a government will run down its stock of foreign reserves in a defense of a fixed exchange rate. An optimizing model of currency crisis is presented in which the decision of whether or not to borrow in a defense of a peg is explicitly...

This paper shows that the quality of banks within each country is one of the important factors that can account for the fact that developing economies tend to suffer more severe output contractions in the wake of a currency crisis than more mature economies. In particular, countries with a...

Benchmark following and portfolio rebalancing effects have often been cited when trying to explain international financial contagion phenomena. Using a dataset containing the country allocation of individual dedicated emerging market equity funds, we assess the relevance of mean-variance...