The paper examines interest rates in nine Latin American and East Asian countries during the period 1987-1994. The goal is to discover why interest rates have remained high, failing to converge to U.S. levels, despite capital market liberalization and a resurgence of portfolio capital inflows...

This paper uses non-parametric tests to provide a description of the "stylized facts" associated with episodes of speculative pressure in foreign exchange markets in Pacific Basin Economies, and to see whether these "stylized facts" appear to be broadly consistent with the alternative...

Early studies have shown that an exchange rate policy which attempts to stimulate exports through aggressive devaluations is often found to be inflationary. This study tests the validity of this hypothesis for the specific case of Indonesia. To analyze the possible inflationary consequence 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,...

The coincidence of banking and currency crises associated with the Asian financial crisis has drawn renewed attention to causal and common factors linking the two phenomena. In this paper, we analyze the incidence and underlying causes of banking and currency crises in 90 industrial and...

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...