In the chaotic financial environment of East Asia in 1997-98, daily changes in stock prices of as much as 10 percent became commonplace. The authors analyze what type of news moved the market in those days of extreme market jitters. They find that movements are triggered by both local and...

The authors test for the existence of asset price bubbles in Latin America in 1980-2001, focusing mainly on stock prices. Based on unit root and cointegration tests, they find that they cannot reject the hypothesis of bubbles. They arrive at the same conclusion using Froot and Obstfeld's...

This paper provides empirical estimates of contracting models of the Phillips curve for four middle-income developing economies-Chile, the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, and Turkey. Following an analytical review, models with both one lead and one lag, and two lags and three leads, are then...

The government's ability to credibly commit to policy announcements is critical to the successful implementation of economic policies as diverse as capital taxation and utilities regulation. One frequently advocated means of signaling credible commitment is to delegate authority to an agency...

Cash prices for wheat in Poland are not closely related to futures prices in Chicago and London, for several reasons: differences in seasonality, fluctuations in exchange rate, poor dissemination of information in Poland, and most important the Polish government's intervention in wheat markets....

Cross-sectional tests of asset returns have a long tradition in finance. The often-used capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and the arbitrage pricing theory both imply cross-sectional relationships between individual asset returns and other factors, and tests of those models have done much to...

Until 1980 Turkey's financial system was shaped to support state-oriented development. After the 1960s the financial system, dominated by commercial banks, became an instrument of planned industrialization. Turkey had an uncompetitive financial market and an inefficient banking system....

Emerging market economies (EMEs) have experienced a noticeable decline in inflation since the mid-1990s. Whether this stable price environment in EMEs is likely to endure and what kind of policies need to be followed to ensure price stability, however, still continue to be questions of...

The authors assess inflation in Czechoslovakia between 1985 and 1991 and identify the main causes of inflation through a literature survey and empirical studies. The official prices in centrally planned economies were never perceived by central planners to be fully market clearing. Only by...

Using bank-level data, the authors apply the Panzar and Rosse (1987) methodology to estimate the extent to which changes in input prices are reflected in revenues earned by specific banks in 50 countries'banking systems. They then relate this competitiveness measure to indicators of...