This paper develops a technique to value guarantees on interest payments on developing-country debt, and provides some preliminary estimates of the cost of such guarantees. The cost of interest payment guarantees is not directly observable because a guarantee is a contingent obligation that...

This paper considers the problem of allocation of investment for a debtor country that faces a ceiling on the amount of foreign debt it can accumulate. It shows that it is optimal for the debtor country to create a more open economy by favoring investment in the export sector over investment in...

This paper tests alternative assumptions concerning the time series behavior of foreign exchange rates. Data for about 20,000 individual trades on foreign exchange options for dollar exchange rates against six major currencies carried out from February 1983 to June 1985 are analyzed. The tests...

A consistent set of disaggregated industrial output data for four Eastern European countries is examined in order to determine the extent to which structural adjustment has taken place since the initiation of market-oriented reform. The latter created a massive relative price shock whose effects...

The quot;traditional structural approachquot; to the determination of real commodity prices has relied exclusively on demand factors as the fundamentals that explain the behavior of commodity prices. This framework, however, has been unable to explain the marked and sustained weakness in...

We assess monetary regime options for Latin American countries. The costs of a common currency are likely to outweigh its benefits, as those countries face diverse economic shocks, do not trade much with each other, and are affected by common international financial shocks only to the same...

This paper analyzes some of the structural problems associated with the Korean financial sector, and investigates whether the financial system has allocated credit in an efficient way over the past three decades. Using data for 32 manufacturing sectors, we find no evidence that credit flows were...

This paper analyzes the credit crunch following the recent financial crisis in Korea. Using enterprise-level data, we find that there were big differences in the magnitude of the credit contraction across different types of firms. In particular, chaebol (conglomerate)-affiliated firms appeared...

Since 1999, the IMF's staff has been tracking several early-warning-system (EWS) models of currency crisis. The results have been mixed. One of the long-horizon models has performed well relative to pure guesswork and to available non-model-based forecasts, such as agency ratings and private...