This paper provides an overview of the major economic events in Argentina from the adoption of the convertibility plan in 1991 to the collapse of the exchange rate regime in 2001. We focus on the relationship between the credibility of the currency board and capital flows, and the inescapable...

Die vorliegende Analyse thematisiert die Bankenkrise bzw. die Krise der Finanzmarktaufsicht in Deutschland in 2007. Im Anschluss an eine Skizzierung der Hauptprobleme werden zahlreiche Schlussfolgerungen vorgestellt, die auf eine nationale und internationale Reform der Finanzmarktaufsicht...

This paper analyzes optimal monetary policy in a two-country model with asymmetric shocks. Agents insure against risk through the exchange of Arrow-Debreu securities. Although central banks commit to the policy that maximizes domestic welfare, this does not lead to price stability. In an attempt...

Sudden stops seem to create the perfect environment for disinflation, especially when central banks defend the exchange rate by increasing interest rates. We propose a variation of the output gap model that incorporates the sudden stop shock. The use of the model in policy analysis shows that...

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) have become a prominent feature of the international financial landscape. They are sufficiently diverse in their origins, structures, and objectives that generalizations are perilous. However, legitimate concerns have been raised in home and host countries about the...

A family of credit risk models is proposed to capture three salient features of Latin American (LA) Sovereign Bond Markets: individual Long Range Dependence in volatility---Long Memory (LM)---, high fractional comovement and time varying risk premia. Evidence in favor of LM is uncovered and the...

This paper tries to assess how costly it would be for the CEECs to peg their exchange rates to the Euro. We use three types of criteria: institutional (the Maastricht criteria); some measure of real convergence; and the Optimal Currency Area criteria. The institutional criteria seem to be an...

The major task of a development-friendly international financial architecture is to mitigate pro-cyclical effects of financial markets and open “policy space” for counter-cyclical macroeconomic policies in the developing world. This paper explores a series of policy instruments for this...

In this paper we look at similarity and convergence between the EU and four of the so-called ”accession countries” of Central and Eastern Europe in terms of trade patterns. We analyse the trade patterns of the Central and Eastern European countries by comparing them to those of the current...

Countries' capital account policies might be contagious in the sense that domestic policies are driven by other countries' policies. A model of strategic interactions is developed to show that countries' best response to policy changes elsewhere consists in imitating this policy. Using a spatial...