The rash of international financial crises in the 1990s have stimulated great interest in models to predict crises and explain the patterns of contagion that follow crisis. In both of these respects analysis of the Asian crisis has proven to be quite controversial. While some economists have...

The criteria of the theory of optimum currency areas suggest that many (most?) countries are not good candidates for either of the poles of genuinely fixed exchange rates or freely floating exchange rates. Thus many countries should have an interest in intermediate exchange rate regimes....

Various claims have been made about the causes of the Asian crisis and its spread. Here, we use data on the behaviour of capital flows during the crisis to test the strong forms of four such hypotheses, that portfolio investors and hedge funds played a dominant role in initiating and/or...