Various claims have been made about the causes of the Asian crisis and its spread. Here, we use data on the behavior of capital flows during the crisis to test the strong forms of four such hypotheses, including the dominant role of portfolio investors and hedge funds in initiating and spreading...

We show that the effects of inflation on growth change substantially as the inflation rate rises. Moreover the nonlinearities are quite different for industrial economies than for developing countries. We find that the threshold at which inflation first begins to seriously negatively affect...

The criteria of the theory of optimum currency areas suggest that many (most?) countries are not good candidates for either of the poles of genuinely fixed exchange rates or freely floating exchange rates. Thus many countries should have an interest in intermediate exchange rate regimes....