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...

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 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 authors investigate the behavior and determinants of inflation in Albania, using three approaches. They decompose inflation into four components: seasonal, cyclical, trend, and random: rely on the widely used Granger causality test, using disaggregated data on both the consumer price index...

Cotton exports account for a significant share of total commodity exports in francophone African countries, suggesting that these countries have a large exposure to volatility in cotton prices. An analysis of the cotton marketing systems in these countries revealed that most of the price risk is...

Advances in information technology have brought new ways of structuring, operating, and supervising securities markets. The Bank's policy advice in institutional reform of securities markets should reflect awareness of the opportunities and problems this presents. As a guide to best practice,...

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....

The authors explore the relative efficiency of stock markets across countries using newly available data on transactions costs and the quality of the informational environment of stock markets. These new measures are constructed from firm-level stock returns in a panel of 60 countries for the...