We characterize a country''s exchange rate regime by how its central bank channels a capital account shock across three variables: exchange depreciation, interest rates, and international reserve flows. Structural vector autoregression estimates for Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey reveal such...

This paper assesses the effect of constrained trade finance on trade flows in countries undergoing financial and balance of payments crises. Most of the countries that had a major crisis had a significant trade contraction, while trade-related finance declined sharply. However, trade may also be...

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the impact of NAFTA on growth and business cycles in Mexico. The effect of the agreement in spurring a dramatic increase in trade and financial flows between Mexico and its NAFTA partners, and its impact on Mexican economic growth and business...

This paper analyzes the effects of intervention on the level and volatility of the exchange rate in Mexico and Turkey, two emerging countries that have floating exchange rate regimes. The paper finds mixed evidence on the effectiveness of intervention. In Mexico, foreign exchange sales have a...

Using company-level data, this paper examines the relative stock-market performance of firms with different foreign-exchange exposures around the time of the 1994/95 Mexican crisis. Contrary to what one might have expected given the alleged peso overvaluation, exporting firms outperformed the...

This paper shows that the dominant view that the high variability of real exchange rates is due to movements in exchange rate-adjusted prices of tradable goods does not hold for Mexican data for periods with a managed exchange rate. The relative price of nontradables accounts for up to 70...

This paper discusses Mexico's Review Under the Flexible Credit Line (FCL) Arrangement. Mexico has navigated successfully a complex external environment, characterized by falling commodity prices, a sharp appreciation of the U.S. dollar, and heightened volatility in international financial...

This paper examines the relative importance of external shocks as sources of business cycle fluctuations in Mexico, and identifies the dynamic responses of domestic output to foreign disturbances. Using a VAR model with block exogeneity restrictions, it finds that U.S. shocks explain a large...

A self-exciting threshold autoregressive model is used to measure transaction costs that may explain relative price differentials and nonlinearities in the behavior of sectoral real exchange rates across Mexico, Canada and the U.S. Interpreting price threshold bands as transactions costs, we...

Economic policies are often judged by a handful of statistics, some of which may be biased during periods of change. We estimate the income growth implied by the evolution of food demand and durable good ownership in post-reform Brazil and Mexico, and find that changes in consumption patterns...