COVID-19 has demonstrated the challenges that policymakers, insurers, businesses, and employees face when disaster assistance programs are developed after the pandemic has already started. There is now an opportunity to design and implement effective and efficient solutions to manage the...

This paper provides an asymmetric information analysis of the recent East Asian crisis. It then outlines several lessons from this crisis. First, there is a strong rationale for an international lender of last resort. Second, without appropriate conditionality for this lending, the moral hazard...

This paper uses firm-level information to evaluate how crises are transmitted internationally. It constructs a new data set of financial statistics, industry information, geographic data, and stock returns for over 10,000 companies in 46 countries to test what types of firms were most affected...

In this paper I analyze several issues related to contagion,' including its definition, recent experiences, alternative channels at work, and possible prevention mechanisms. The discussion deals with the macroeconomics implications of contagion, and concentrates on the relationship between the...

This paper applies a full-information technique to test for the presence of contagion across the money markets of ERM member countries. We show that whenever it is possible to estimate a model for interdependence, a test for contagion based on a full information technique is more powerful. We...