Following the 1997-1998 financial turmoil, crisis countries in Asia moved toward either floating or fixed exchange rate systems, superficially consistent with the bipolar view of exchange rate regimes and the "hollow middle" hypothesis. But some observers have claimed that, despite the changes...

A number of studies have stressed the role of movements in U.S. interest rates and country spreads in driving business cycles in emerging market economies. At the same time, country spreads have been found to respond to changes in both the U.S. interest rate and domestic conditions in emerging...

Japanese official intervention in the foreign exchange market is of by far the largest magnitude in the world, despite little or no evidence that it is effective in moving exchange rates. Up until recently, however, official data on intervention has not been available for Japan. This paper...

This paper assesses the relationship between money and credit and episodes of sharp depreciation in East Asia by (i) examining growth rates of money and credit variables around depreciation episodes; (ii) estimating the impact of money and credit variables on the probability of a share...

This article formulates and tests for New Zealand a model of exchange rate determination focusing on non-tradeable goods and terms-of-trade shifts. We emphasize the equilibrium properties of this framework and, in this context, estimate an error correction model where adjustment in response to...

Previous studies, investigating how the market in general viewed the impact of a big earthquake (e.g., the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area) on insurance firm values, found a positive reaction of insurers' stock prices. This "gaining from loss" may be caused by the...

The paper is concerned with exchange rate instability, by which we mean large changes in exchange rates. The paper has two objectives. First, we search for plausible determinants of currency crashes. To do this we examine annual panel data for a large sample of developing countries. The work is...

This paper explores econometric and theoretical interpretations for the relatively high demand for international reserves by countries in the Far East and the relatively low demand by some other developing countries. Using a sample of about 125 developing countries, we show that reserve holdings...

Spillovers effects, from one country or region to other countries and regions, have attracted renewed attention in the aftermath of the Mexican crisis of December 1994. This paper uses data on closed-end country funds to study how a negative shock in Mexican equities is transmitted to Asia and...

This paper reviews recent progress in applying information-theoretic tools to long-standing exchange rate puzzles. I begin by distinguishing the traditional public information approach (e.g., monetary models, including new open-economy models) from the newer dispersed information approach. (The...