There is considerable disagreement among analysts about the extent to which the spread of the Asian crisis was based on reasonable changes in expectations about fundamentals versus pure contagion effects resulting from imperfections in the behavior of currency and financial markets. In this...

This paper argues that while sources of potential discipline over domestic macro economic policies such as pegged exchange rates, high capital mobility, and IMF policy conditionality are commonly viewed as constraints, it is usually more productive to view them as influencing incentive...

In this paper we ask how to construct a tariff or quota schedule which depends on the behavior of a domestic monopsonistic monopolist in order to achieve the best tradeoff between two objectives of a government. We consider various political and economic tradeoffs which could face the policy...

We argue that the depth and breadth of the spread of the current crisis from the US subprime market across the globe was due more to the buildup of substantial financial vulnerabilities prior to the crisis than to irrational panic during the crisis. We examine how these developments explain the...

We investigate whether some types of capital flows are more likely to reverse than others during currency crises. Earlier statistical testing has yielded conflicting results on this issue. We argue that the problem with the earlier studies is that the degree of variability of capital flows...