Various claims have been made about the causes of the Asian crisis and its spread. Here, we use data on the behavior of capital flows during the crisis to test the strong forms of four such hypotheses, including the dominant role of portfolio investors and hedge funds in initiating and spreading...

There is considerable disagreement among analysts about the extent to which the spread of the Asian crisis was based on reasonable changes in expectations about fundamentals versus pure contagion effects resulting from imperfections in the behavior of currency and financial markets. In this...

Since Japanese banks have been the major creditors in Asia, Japan has been a notable source of regional macroeconomic fluctuations. This study explores the patterns of Japanese bank claims in East Asian economies, focusing on the transmission effects of Japanese financial shock via international...

I analyze how U.S. financial shocks and the U.S. business cycle, as well as the business cycles of local economies, can help explain changes in international lending by U.S. banks. I find that during the financial crisis of 2007-8, U.S. financial shocks were transmitted to emerging market...

This paper investigates whether the adoption of a more floating exchange rate regime with inflation targeting has improved the vulnerability of the exchange rate, by looking at the Korean case. Using the NATREX model, I estimate the equilibrium real exchange rate of the Won and its misalignment....

This paper overviews and compares China's gradual economic liberalization with other transitional economies moving from planned economy to market economy such as Vietnam in Asia and Russia. China liberalized its economy more slowly than Vietnam and Russia. In the early stage of reform, China...

How can one use the results derived in Sections 3 and 4? The type of use one can make in theoretical voting analysis was suggested in Section 4 already. Comparative statics results on how desired budget levels vary with tax system parameters (such as number of exemptions, size of tax credits,...

In this paper we empirically examine whether public facilities like providing primary school, medical clinics, electricity etc help incumbents to stay in power. Specifically, we analyze the parliamentary election outcomes in 483 constituents in rural India from 1971 to 1991. This study is based...

The traditional median voter model predicts that median income and taxprice are the primary determinants of local school spending levels. It further implies that lump-sum grants wills be utilized like private income, and thus income and grant coefficients should be the same. Our comprehensive...