Since the East Asian crises of 1997, a number of East Asian economies have allowed greater exchange rate flexibility and abandoned monetary targets in favor of inflation targeting, apparently because the perceived usefulness of money as a predictor of inflation, i.e. the information content of...

This paper analyzes the role of money, credit, trade and competitiveness variables in signaling currency crises in a sample of East Asian and Latin American countries over the period 1972:01 - 1997:10. Bivariate tests suggest that money and credit, as well as trade and competitiveness variables,...

We apply Becker's (1983) model of lobbying to show that liberalization of foreign bank entry may result from political changes and a fall in domestic bank efficiency caused by lack of competition, which raises the costs to domestic banks of restricting foreign bank entry. We also show that in...