Currently the U.S. is experiencing record budget and current account deficits, a phenomenon familiar from the Twin Deficits discussion of the 1980s. In contrast, during the 1990s productivity growth has been identified as the primary cause of the U.S. current account deficit. We suggest a...

The academic literature has so far little to say about the underlying causes of the large structural asset and liability imbalances of emerging markets that frequently contributed to financial crises. The aim of the paper is to contribute to filling this gap by proposing a theoretical model that...

No empirical evidence has yet emerged for the existence of a robust positive relationship between financial openness and economic growth. This paper argues that a key reason for the elusive evidence is the presence of a time-varying relationship between openness and growth over time: countries...

The paper extends the standard intertemporal model of the current account to include two important stylised facts: (1) the persistence of current account positions and (2) the relevance of the fiscal balance. Specifically, the paper derives a closed form solution for consumption in the presence...

This paper develops a new Early Warning System (EWS) model for predicting financial crises, based on a multinomial logit model. It is shown that EWS approaches based on binomial discrete-dependent-variable models can be subject to what we call a post-crisis bias. This bias arises when no...

Based on a dataset of 112 emerging economies and developing countries, this paper addresses two key questions regarding the accumulation of international reserves: first, has the accumulation of reserves effectively protected countries during the 2008-09 financial crisis? And second, what...

Although many papers have already proposed empirical models of currency crises, the timing of such crises has received relatively little attention so far. Most papers use indeed a static specification and impose the same lag structure across all explanatory variables. This, by construction,...

This paper estimates export and import price equations for 40 countries—including 22 emerging market economies (EMEs)—and aims to understand heterogeneity across countries in the degree of exchange rate pass-through to import and to export prices. The results indicate that (i) export price...

While the impact of exchange rate changes on economic growth has long been an issue of key importance in international macroeconomics, it has received renewed attention in recent years, owing to weaker growth rates and the debate on "currency wars". However, in spite of its prevalence in the...