Prevailing views suggest that short-term, unhedged foreign borrowing and crony capitalism, in combination with a weak financial system and lack of transparency may lie at the heart of the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Although the crisis first began in Thailand, it quickly spread to the rest...

Using Benford's law, we find evidence supporting the hypothesis that countries at times misreport their economic data strategically. We group countries with similar economic conditions and find that for countries with fixed exchange rate regimes, high negative net foreign asset positions,...

The global financial crisis posed as much of a challenge for the foreign exchange reserve policies of emerging countries as it did for their economic policies and financial systems. This pushed many countries into rethinking their strategies about foreign exchange reserves. This study presents...

This paper presents empirical evidence that bank lending, and capital inflows can explain the severity of the Asian crisis of 1997 above and beyond macroeconomic fundamentals. We find that countries that share Japanese banks as their major lender with Thailand, the first victim in the Asian...

The basic purpose of this study is to didactically demonstrate the factors shaping the currency swap stock of domestic banks prior to the crisis and to provide a descriptive analysis of how the structure and the functioning of the market changed during the crisis. The main conclusions of the...

The authors find evidence supporting the hypothesis that countries at times misreport their eco-nomic data in a strategic manner. Among those suspected are countries with xed exchange rate regimes, high negative net foreign asset positions or negative current account balances, which corroborates...

This paper studies the dynamics of the U.S. external position for the past 35 years, and examines alternative paths for future external adjustment. We develop a new present value expression for the external position that embeds the restrictions of international solvency and can be easily...