Search Results
Working Paper
Capital inflows, financial intermediation, and aggregate demand.
In trying to explain the balance-of-payments and banking crises of 1994-95 that erupted in Mexico, observers have pointed to various effects of the substantial capital inflows that took place in the preceding half decade. It has been argued that these inflows contributed to rapid monetary growth, real appreciation of the peso, and the widening of Mexico's current account deficit. In addition, by making available credit for consumption loans at a time when investment spending in Mexico was not yet ready to grow rapidly, these inflows may have contributed to the fall in Mexico's savings rate. ; ...
Working Paper
Exchange rate rules in support of disinflation programs in developing countries
This paper analyzes how exchange rate policies can best support the sustainability of disinflation programs. Freezing the nominal exchange rate frequently has been recommended as a means of suppressing inertial inflation and accelerating the disinflation process. However, because any resultant real exchange rate appreciation often must be corrected through a subsequent devaluation, targeting the nominal exchange rate may merely postpone inflation rather than eliminate it once-and-for-all. This paper argues that because excessive inflation during any particular period may jeopardize the ...
Journal Article
U.S. international transactions in 2002
After slightly narrowing during the cyclical slowdown of 2001, the U.S. current account deficit widened in 2002, as it had over the previous decade. Two-thirds of the increase in the deficit last year was attributable to an increase in the deficit for trade in goods and services. In addition, net investment income receded as receipts from abroad declined more than payments on foreign investments in the United States. The record $503 billion U.S. current account deficit registered in 2002 was financed by continued high levels of private capital inflows and stepped-up foreign official purchases ...
Working Paper
Explaining the global pattern of current account imbalances
This paper assesses some of the explanations that have been put forward for the global pattern of current account imbalances that has emerged in recent years: in particular, the large U.S. current account deficit and the large surpluses of the Asian developing economies. Based on the approach developed by Chinn and Prasad (2003), we use data for 61 countries during 1982-2003 to estimate panel regression models for the ratio of the current account balance to GDP. We find that a model that includes as its explanatory variables the standard determinants of current accounts proposed in the ...
Working Paper
Devaluation, exchange controls, and black markets for foreign exchange in developing countries
This paper considers how exchange controls, black markets, and forward-looking expectations condition the impact of exchange rate devaluations in developing countries. A model incorporating these features is developed to analyze the response of key external balance indicators to anticipated devaluations. The model is driven by the movements of black market exchange rates in perfect foresight equilibrium, which in turn force changes in export under-invoicing and official trade statistics. The predicted movements in all measurable variables, both before and after devaluation, closely mirror ...
Working Paper
Identifying the role of moral hazard in international financial markets
Considerable attention has been paid to the possibility that large-scale IMF-led financing packages may have distorted incentives in international financial markets, leading private investors to provide more credit to emerging market countries, and at lower interest rates, than might otherwise have been the case. Yet, prior attempts to identify such distortions have yielded mixed evidence, at best. This paper makes three contributions to our ability to assess the empirical importance of moral hazard in international financial markets. First, it is argued that because large international ...
Working Paper
A multi-country comparison of the linkages between inflation and exchange rate competitiveness
This paper describes research comparing the response of inflation to changes in exchange rate competitiveness in various regions of the world. The paper first presents evidence that an empirical relationship between the rate of inflation and the level of the real exchange rate, which was documented for Mexico in previous research by the author, holds for a large set of other countries as well. This result may pose a dilemma for policy-makers, since it implies that it may not be possible to achieve low inflation and a high export competitiveness simultaneously. The paper then demonstrates that ...
Working Paper
Real interest rates during the disinflation process in developing countries
This paper addresses a phenomenon often noted in association with programs aimed at stabilizing high rates of inflation: a rise in the ex post real interest rate following implementation of the disinflation strategy. Such increases have been observed in connection with the stopping of European hyperinflations in the 1920s, as well as during the more recent experiences of disinflation in Argentina and Israel. To better understand this behavior, we develop a very general model of interest rate determination in a small open economy with two goods--traded and non-traded--and three assets--money, ...
Discussion Paper
Are Rising U.S. Interest Rates Destabilizing for Emerging Market Economies?
Rising U.S. interest rates are often thought to be bad news for emerging market economies (EMEs) as they increase debt burdens, trigger capital outflows, and generally cause a tightening of financial conditions that can lead to financial crises. Indeed, as shown in Figure 1 below, the rise in the federal funds rate (the black line) during the Volcker disinflation of the early 1980s was associated with a sharp rise in the incidence of financial crises in EMEs (the green bars).