The recent Asian currency crisis was caused by large prospective fiscal deficits associated with implicit bailout guarantees to failing banking systems. Absent the political will to raise taxes or cut spending, governments must resort to seignorage revenues to pay for the bailout of the banking...

This paper builds upon the model of Kaminsky and Reinhart (1999) and extends it to triplecrises. It applies a new visualisation approach combining elements of an event study analysis and a fan chart technique. This approach illustrates the deviation of fundamentals in the runup to...

Financial crises are high cost events which can transmit across international borders. Using data from 1883 to 2008, this article develops a means of mapping changes in the degree of international synchronisation of banking and currency crises through a formal concordance index. This index...

We compare the banking crises in 2008-09 and in the Great Depression, and analyse differences in the policy response to the two crises in light of the prevailing international monetary systems. The scale of the 2008-09 banking crisis, as measured by falls in international short-term indebtedness...

Central banks' international reserve holdings have increased significantly in the recent past. While traditional models fail to explain this accumulation of reserves, the more recent literature argues that reserves are used as a lifejacket against currency crises. However, research so far has...

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the choice of exchange rate regime can affect the likelihood of banking crises in emerging countries. We estimate the impact of exchange rate arrangements on crises in a panel-data set of 56 emerging countries using a logit method. We find that...

During the last two decades the emerging countries have experienced an upward trend in reserve accumulation. However, high level of foreign reserve assets implies certain costs. Consequently, given the trade-off between the benefits and the costs of holding reserves, there are issues related to...

This paper aims to identify key empirical regularities in the run-up to banking and currency crises that would enable officials and private market participants to recognize vulnerability to financial crises at an earlier stage. This, in turn, should make it easier to motivate the corrective...