Over the past two hundred years -- some would argue even longer -- financial events, such as the devaluation of a currency or an announcement of default, have been capable of triggering an immediate adverse chain reaction among countries within a region and in some cases across regions. The...

A model that merges the monetary approach to the balance of payments and a neoclassical growth model into a unified framework in which inflation, growth, and the balance of payments are simultaneously determined and estimated. The tradeoff between the simplifying assumtions of the model and its...

This papers examines the empirical literature on currency crises and proposes a specific early warning system. This system involves monitoring the evolution of several indicators that tend to exhibit unusual behaviorin the periods preceding a crisis. When an indicator exceeds a certain threshold...

More frequent and increasingly severe crises are encouraging emerging market economies to seek means to make themselves less vulnerable to sudden stops in capital flows. Capital controls have been widely discussed, but dollarization may offer a longer-term and more market-friendly solution.

I appreciate the opportunity to discuss this paper by Ricardo Caballero, Emmanuel Farhi, and Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas. This paper was described to me as a mix of theoretical and empirical work that attempts a hat trick: explaining the joint combination of global imbalances, the deflation of the...

Policymakers would do well to bear in mind the seven lessons that emerge from this overview of modern hyperinflations. Hyperinflations seldom materialize overnight and are usually preceded by a protracted period of high and variable inflation.Stabilization may take years if fiscal policies are...

In the early 1990s capital flows to the Asian economies were dominated by FDI. By contrast, Latin America was attracting little FDI and a large share of its inflows were either short-term or portfolio and viewed as “hot money.” These differences gave rise to the view that Latin America was...

In this short note we further discuss the role of macroeconomic policies to deal with surges in capital inflows. Primarily policies aimed at avoiding financial crises or an overvaluation of the real exchange rate.

Comment: What Nancy Marion does in this paper is to present a cohesive survey of three strands of literature: the theoretical literature on currency crises, banking crises, and the more recent papers that have attempted to link the two. It is the "twin crisis" literature, which focuses on...

In this paper, we use long-run annual data to estimate the intertemporal elasticity of substitution while accounting for the intra-temporal substitution between nondurable consumption goods and durable consumption goods. We apply a two-step procedure that combines a cointegration approach to...