Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 110.
(refine search)
Working Paper
On the dollar and the yen
Working Paper
Banking and currency crises: how common are twins?
The coincidence of banking and currency crises associated with the Asian financial crisis has drawn renewed attention to causal and common factors linking the two phenomena. In this paper, we analyze the incidence and underlying causes of banking and currency crises in 90 industrial and developing countries over the 1975-97 period. We measure the individual and joint ("twin") occurrence of bank and currency crises and assess the extent to which each type of crisis provides information about the likelihood of the other. ; We find that the twin crisis phenomenon is most common in ...
Working Paper
Monetary policy in Japan: a structural VAR analysis
This paper studies the objectives and operating procedures of the Bank of Japan (BOJ) during the period 1975-94. To do this we adapt Bernanke and Mihov's (1995) structural VAR model, which nests several alternative hypotheses concerning central bank behavior. In particular, the model separately identifies the anticipated and unanticipated components of monetary policy, and is capable of distinguishing between interest rate targeting and various types of reserve targeting. ; Three main results emerge from the analysis. First, no single target can explain the BOJ's behavior. Instead, the ...
Working Paper
Financial structure and macroeconomic performance over the short and long run
We examine the relationship between indicators of financial development and economic performance for a cross-country panel over long and short periods. Our long-term results are consistent with much of the literature in that we find a positive relationship between financial development and economic growth. However, we fail to find a significant positive relationship after accounting for disparities in factor accumulation. These results therefore indicate that the primary channel for financial development to facilitate growth over the long run is through physical and human capital ...
Working Paper
Are crisis-induced devaluations contractionary?
Why are some currency crises followed by economic contractions while others are not? This paper is an attempt at answering this query. In particular, we investigate two closely related questions. First, we explore whether there is a difference in the output effects of a devaluation during normal periods versus crises ones; after all, during noncrisis periods, real exchange devaluation is seen as an important policy option for promoting exports and output growth. Yet, the literature has not made a distinction between crisis and noncrisis periods. To preview the main conclusion, we find that ...
Working Paper
China's foreign trade reform, 1979-91
Working Paper
Asian finance and the role of bankruptcy
The degree to which bankruptcy is permitted to play a role in the allocation of capital is a key distinction between the Asian state-directed financial regime and the Western market-directed version. The paper discusses the two approaches to finance and argues that a major problem with the bank finance model used in many Asian countries is its minimization of bankruptcy risks. A three-sector development model (agriculture, manufacturing, and financial sector) is developed and simulated to compare the outcomes of the two approaches separately and then to evaluate the transition costs of ...
Working Paper
Sudden stops and the Mexican wave: currency crises, capital flow reversals and output loss in emerging markets
Sudden Stops are the simultaneous occurrence of a currency/balance of payments crisis with a reversal in capital flows (Calvo, 1998). We investigate the output effects of financial crises in emerging markets, focusing on whether sudden-stop crises are a unique phenomenon and whether they entail an especially large and abrupt pattern of output collapse (a Mexican wave). Despite an emerging theoretical literature on Sudden Stops, empirical work to date has not precisely identified their occurrences nor measured their subsequent output effects in broad samples. Analysis of Sudden Stops may ...
Working Paper
Trade and growth in East Asian countries: cause and effect?
Estimates of growth equations have found a role for openness, particularly in explaining rapid growth among East Asian countries. But major concerns of simultaneous causality between growth and trade have been expressed. This study aims to deal with the endogeneity of trade by using as instrumental variables the exogenous determinants from the gravity model of bilateral trade, such as proximity to trading partners. Our preliminary finding is that the effect of openness on growth is even clearer when we correct for the endogeneity of openness than in standard OLS estimates. We conclude ...