As part of a proposed two-stage early warning system, we estimate "safety zones" for fundamentals under which currency crashes are unlikely to occur. We depart from traditional regression-based early warning systems and instead estimate the set of fundamentals for which currency crises never...

The key to Soviet economic reform is competition. Cultural inertia, ideology, and vested privilege discourage competition. The attempts at reform have achieved no significant breakthrough in the state sector. In the non-state sector the situation is more promising. To the extent that the new Law...

An agent of unknown expertise is requested to forecast the mean of an uncertain outcome. The agent can refine forecasts at a constant marginal cost per unit precision, but neither cost nor precision can be verified by the planner. The problem is to induce both truthful revelation and an...

Energy exports, which are already the primary source of Soviet convertible currency earnings and an important contributor to the budget, could bring in much more revenue if the Soviet Union were to reduce its extremely high levels of energy consumption. To encourage this process, energy prices...

It is not unusual for reforming socialist economies to relax wage controls without hardening budget constraints on enterprises or freeing consumer goods prices. This policy can be dangerously destabilizing. While higher wages permit workers to purchase more of some goods, they also tend to...

When a formerly centrally planned economy frees prices and allows or compels producers to respond to market signals, conventional measures tend to severely overstate short-run output decline and inflation. The overstatement stems partly from neglect of private sector activity or belated...

This paper provides an analytic overview of independent currency authorities (ICAs), sometimes called currency boards. ICAs issue and redeem domestic currency on demand against an exchange standard and back such operations through a 100 percent marginal foreign reserve cover. They also impose...

Author of the acclaimed work Iceberg Risk: An Adventure in Portfolio Theory, Kent Osband argues that uncertainty is central rather than marginal to finance. Markets don't trade mainly on changes in risk. They trade on changes in beliefs about risk. In the process, markets unite, stretch, and...