Various claims have been made by economist and others as to what caused the Asian crisis, as well as what caused its spread through much of East Asia. Here, we perform some initial testing of four hypotheses, including the dominant role of portfolio investors and hedge funds in initiating and...

International capital flows to developing countries have taken on considerable policy importance in recent years. There is disagreement, however, about whether financial capital mobility has become so high that developing countries have little ability to sterilize capital flows. This paper...

Various claims have been made about the causes of the Asian crisis and its spread. Here, we use data on the behavior of capital flows during the crisis to test the strong forms of four such hypotheses, including the dominant role of portfolio investors and hedge funds in initiating and spreading...

The rash of international financial crises in the 1990s have stimulated great interest in models to predict crises and explain the patterns of contagion that follow crisis. In both of these respects analysis of the Asian crisis has proven to be quite controversial. While some economists have...