The paper provides an overview of the profound and rapid changes in banking brought about by technology and deregulation, and discusses the hurdles that will have to be negotiated for putting in place the three pillars-capital adequacy rules, supervision, and market discipline-of the bank...

Policymakers often express concern that herding by financial market participants destabilizes markets and increases the fragility of the financial system. This paper provides an overview of the recent theoretical and empirical research on herd behavior in financial markets. It addresses the...

This paper develops a constant, data-coherent, error correction model for broad money demand (M3) in Greece. The model contributes to a better understanding of the effects of monetary policy in Greece, and of the portfolio consequences of financial innovation in general. The broad monetary...

This paper examines the interaction between capital flows and international reserve holdings in the context of increasing financial integration. For emerging markets the sensitivity of reserves to net capital flows was negative in the 1980s, but became positive after the Asian crisis when these...

This paper explains the IMF approach to economic stabilization. It argues that a Fund-supported program is a process, comprising six broadly defined phases, that evolves along a multiplicity of potential pathways. The paper discusses the three-pronged approach to stabilization at the core of all...

This study extends the research on balance-of-payments crises by investigating the dynamics of the collapse of a crawling exchange rate in the presence of an explicit link between the fiscal deficit and domestic credit. It shows that such an exchange rate regime is characterized by two potential...

This paper examines the pattern of dollarization in Latin America, focusing on the experience of five countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay) during 1970-1993. It presents evidence on the relative size of dollarization, the allocation of foreign currency deposits, and the...

More than eight years after the introduction of the euro, impacts on developing countries have been relatively modest. Overall, the euro has become much more important in debt issuance than in official foreign exchange reserve holdings. The former has benefited from the creation of a large set...