The author presents evidence that balance sheet effects are critical determinants of both the likelihood of a crisis and of income losses following a crisis. She tests the validity of"insurance"and"liquidity"models of currency crisis. Both models predict that the occurrence of a balance of...

It is well accepted that exchange rate policy in many emerging markets has been characterized by shifts between a stronger and weaker commitment to peg. This raises the following questions, which we address in our paper: Does intervention policy exhibit clearly defined and periodic shifts? What...

The objective of this paper is to empirically test across alternative, apparently observationally equivalent theories of currency crises. Theories of crises are often difficult to distinguish from each other based on the behavior of commonly used predictors. Using a comprehensive data set on...

The early start of the process of bank restructuring and privatization in Hungary provides a longer and richer amount of evidence than that available for any other transition economy. The authors analyze the dynamics of bank restructuring in Hungary with a focus on the role played by foreign...

The authors apply regime-switching methods to a monetarist model of exchange rates and identify well-defined intervention policy cycles. The policy response indices include a standard exchange market pressure-based index and a model-based volatility ratio that is endogenized relative to Japan,...

Peace came accompanied not only by the end to the human drama associated with the conflicts, but also by a significant economic dividend, a much needed development in a region where per capita gross domestic product (GDP) had stagnated between 1970 and 1990 and where two countries (El Salvador...

This article studies the evolution of the private saving rate in India during 1960-95. Its distinctive feature is that it proposes three new measures of private saving, which are incremental improvements to the (naive) national accounts measure. The improvements consist of accounting for capital...

Soaring commodity prices in 2007 and 2008 raised concerns that volatility was also rising, which would have implications for welfare and therefore for the design of public policy interventions. The literature focuses on trends in commodity prices rather than their volatility characteristics....

This paper investigates the effect of ownership and competition on Indian bank productivity since the 1991 reforms. We find that Indian private banks dominate the public and foreign banks both in terms of productivity levels and productivity growth, with the new Indian private banks leading the...

Exchange rate policy in many emerging markets shifts between a stronger and weaker commitment to peg. This observation raises the following questions, which we address in our paper: Does intervention policy exhibit switching? And if so, what causes policy to shift? The theoretical literature...