The apparent success of several East Asian countries in sterilizing capital inflows seems to contradict findings of high capital mobility. This paper argues that empirical studies examining money market rates may be misleading, since most lending is mediated through domestic banking systems. In...

This paper provides indirect tests of the hypothesis that exchange rate movements may be largely coterminus with changes in preferences for holding claims on different countries. It is argued that changes in country preferences will be reflected systematically in the price of gold and, hence,...

A new aggregation scheme used to measure the sources of fiscal financing of indebted countries suggests that there was a fundamental improvement in the seniority of domestic debt at the expense of foreign bank debt during the late 1980s. We argue that this was the revenue maximizing response of...

Recent sanctions on the use of Russia's international reserve assets seem likely to reduce the appeal of US dollar reserves as a "shock absorber" for international payments. But international reserves are also a means to reassure foreign investors that problematic countries will not confiscate...