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Working Paper
Crisis, contagion, and country funds: effects on East Asia and Latin America
Spillovers effects, from one country or region to other countries and regions, have attracted renewed attention in the aftermath of the Mexican crisis of December 1994. This paper uses data on closed-end country funds to study how a negative shock in Mexican equities is transmitted to Asia and Latin America, and to particular countries within each region. Country funds allow us to study the transmission to other fund net asset values (NAVs) and prices, which are traded in local stock markets in New York, respectively. The evidence indicates that shocks such as the Mexican crisis produce ...
Journal Article
Do international financial crises defy diagnosis?
Journal Article
A chronology of the Mexican financial crisis
Journal Article
The Mexican peso crisis: implications for international finance
The Mexican peso crisis has raised legitimate questions about Mexican economic policies before and during the events of December 1994 and January 1995, but its propagation through international financial markets has also pointed to broader questions about those markets. This article considers the international financial implications of the peso crisis from three perspectives: the creditors and their markets, the countries receiving large capital inflows, and the functioning of the international financial system.
Journal Article
The banking sector rescue in Mexico
In Mexico the December 1994 peso devaluation provoked a profound economic downturn in that country and revealed a fragile banking sector. Fearful that the financial system would collapse under a rising level of past due loans, the Mexican government mounted a rescue of the banking sector by intervening in the daily operations of some problem banks while establishing a series of capitalization and restructuring programs available to all banks. ; This article examines Mexico's bank rescue efforts (1995-98) with a particular focus on the role of the deposit insurance fund, the Bank Fund for the ...
Journal Article
Understanding recent crises in emerging markets
The world economy is going through a difficult and dangerous period. The recent Brazilian currency meltdown is one more in a series of events that includes the Asian crises of 1997-98 and the Mexican crash in 1994, and there is uncertainty about whether other emerging economies will be infected with the Brazilian virus. ; Dealing with crises in emerging economies is, therefore, an urgent matter. However, what to do about these crises is a source of heated debate. According to the author of this article, much of the confusion arises from the fact that accumulated knowledge about crises in ...
Working Paper
Did the debt crisis or the oil price decline cause Mexico's investment collapse?
This paper proposes a simple investment model that permits a test of the relative importance of Mexico's terms of trade decline, the reversal in net capital inflows, and the debt overhang, in explaining Mexico's investment decline in the early 1980's. The paper uses previously unexploited sectoral investment data between 1981 and 1985 to estimate the quantitative importance of these explanations. The data indicate that the main microeconomic mechanism driving the investment decline was the rise in the relative price of investment goods and further that the deterioration in Mexico's ...
Report
The balance of payments and borrowing constraints: an alternative view of the Mexican crisis
In this paper we develop a model in which a country faces a balance of payments crisis if constraints on its international borrowing bind. We use the model to describe the dynamics of the trade balance, capital account, and balance of payments of a country that borrows to finance consumption following sweeping macroeconomic and structural reforms and then hits constraints on its international borrowing. We compare the predictions of this theoretical example with events in Mexico from 1987 through 1995.
Journal Article
Mexico's financial crisis affected other Latin countries
Working Paper
Country fund discounts and the Mexican crisis of December 1994: did local residents turn pessimistic before international investors?
It has been suggested that Mexican investors were the "front-runners" in the peso crisis of December 1994, turning pessimistic before international investors. Different expectations about their own economy, perhaps due to asymmetric information, prompted Mexican investors to be the first ones to leave the country. This paper investigates whether data from three Mexican country funds provide evidence that supports the "divergent expectations" hypothesis. We find that, right before the devaluation, Mexican country fund Net Asset Values (driven mainly by Mexican investors) dropped faster ...