We investigate the output effects of severe banking and currency crises in emerging markets, focusing on whether “twin crises” (simultaneous occurrence of currency and banking crises) exist as a unique phenomenon and whether they entail especially large losses. Recent literature, mostly...

Though the Japanese banking system has been the focus of numerous empirical studies, there is scant empirical evidence on the characteristics of loan contracts between Japanese firms and their banks. This paper incorporates relatively new contract-specific data on bank loans to large borrowers...

We outline a model of an endogenously evolving banking crisis in a growing economy subject to either idiosyncratic or aggregate productivity shocks. The model incorporates agency problems at two levels: between firms and their banks and between banks and the banks' depositors and deposit...

A dynamic latent factor model of stock market returns is estimated using simulation-based techniques. Stock market volatility is decomposed into common and idiosyncratic components, and volatility decompositions are compared between stable and turmoil periods to test for possible shift-contagion...

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...

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...

A small, open macroeconomic model that accounts for new financial accelerator effects (the effects of fluctuations in asset prices on bank credit and economic activity) is developed to evaluate various policy rules for inflation targeting. Given conditions in asset markets and the fragility of...

Examination of special cases assists understanding of the mechanics of long-run economic growth more generally. Australia and California are two economies having the rare distinction of achieving 150 years of sustained high and rising living standards for rapidly expanding populations. They are...