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Working Paper
Borrowing constraints and asset market dynamics: evidence from the Pacific Basin
This paper estimates a linearized, stochastic version of Kiyotaki and Moore's (1997) credit cycle model, using land price data from Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea. It is shown that the welfare costs of borrowing constraints are positively related to the persistence of (de-trended) land price fluctuations. When the residual demand curve for land is inelastic and the steady state share of land held by the constrained sector is less than 30 percent, welfare costs are less than 1 percent of GDP in all countries. However, the costs of borrowing constraints rise quickly as the constrained sector ...
Working Paper
Was there a boom in money and credit prior to East Asia's recent currency crisis?
This paper assesses the relationship between money and credit and episodes of sharp depreciation in East Asia by (i) examining growth rates of money and credit variables around depreciation episodes; (ii) estimating the impact of money and credit variables on the probability of a share depreciation episode using logit models; (iii) evaluating the signals contained in money and credit variables prior to episodes of sharp currency depreciation. Reserve money grew rapidly prior to the 1997 currency crisis in East Asia. However, signs of a money or credit boom based on other indicators were ...
Journal Article
Dealing with currency speculation in the Asian Pacific Basin
Working Paper
Thoughts on the origins of the Asia crisis: impulses and propagation mechanisms
The traditional fundamentals suggested by first and second-generation of crisis models did not provide much indication of an impending crisis in Asia. Growing current account deficits and somewhat overvalued real exchange rates suggested some need to curtail domestic demand and/or engineer nominal currency depreciation, but did not suggest a crisis of the magnitude that has occurred. ; Nevertheless, to a large extent, the Asian crisis can be explained in terms of impulses and propagation mechanisms related to fundamentals, specifically general weaknesses and distortions in the financial ...
Journal Article
Going down: the Asian crisis and U.S. exports
The Asian financial and economic crisis has attracted much attention to the trade links among the United States and countries throughout Asia. Until the crisis, U.S. exports to East Asia were growing rapidly. In this article, Patricia S. Pollard and Cletus C. Coughlin examine the abrupt decline in exports and provide estimates of the sizes of the export shock both to the U.S. economy as a whole and to specific sectors. More than half the industries they studied experienced declines in exports to East Asia of more than 15 percent; however, focusing solely on the export data overstates the ...
Speech
Asia, trade deficits, and the health of the U.S. economy
Remarks before the Greater Dallas Asian American Chamber of Commerce, Dallas, Texas, February 23, 2006 ; "As long as the Federal Reserve does its job of holding inflation at bay, and as long as our political leaders resist protectionism and let the private sector get on with its work, we will remain the world's predominant economic machine.">
Working Paper
ASEAN in a regional perspective
There are two striking conventional wisdoms about the status of regional trading blocs in East Asia. The first is that the only formal regional arrangement in the area, ASEAN, does not in fact function as an economic bloc. Trade among the members is thought to be very low. The second is that East Asia taken as a whole does function as a trading and investment bloc, under Japanese direction, and increasingly so over time. This despite the absence of any formal preferential trading area among these countries. This characterization of East Asian trading patterns is not entirely correct. ; ...
Journal Article
Responding to Asia's crises
Working Paper
Is there private information in the FX market? the Tokyo experiment
It is a common view that private information in the foreign exchange market does not exist. We provide evidence against this view. The evidence comes from the introduction of trading in Tokyo over the lunch-hour. Lunch return variance doubles with the introduction of trading, which cannot be due to public information since the flow of public information did not change with the trading rules. Having eliminated public information as the cause, we exploit recent results in microstructure to discriminate between the two alternatives: private information and pricing errors. Three key results ...
Journal Article
Asia's trade performance after the currency crisis
The Asian countries hit by the 1997-98 currency crisis experienced a sharp reversal of capital flows that forced their current account balances to move from deficit to surplus. This study of the trade flows of Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, and Thailand finds that steep declines in imports, measured in dollar terms, accounted for almost all of the improvements in current account balances. However, a fuller picture emerges when the authors analyze the trade flows according to the volume of goods being shipped and the prices of these goods. The analysis shows that several factors contributed ...