The Global Credit Crisis of 2008-09 has underscored the urgency of reforming the international financial architecture. While a number of short-term reforms are already in train, this paper contemplates more ambitious reforms of the international financial architecture that might be implemented...

Intro -- Contents -- I. INTRODUCTION -- II. SUDDEN STOPS AND MULTILATERAL INSURANCE -- III. CAPITAL FLOWS AND SUDDEN STOPS -- IV. IMF-SUPPORTED PROGRAMS -- V. MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS -- VI. IMF-SUPPORTED PROGRAMS AND SUDDEN STOPS -- VII. EXTENSIONS -- VIII. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS -- Appendix...

After moving slowly downward for the better part of four decades, central bank gold holdings have risen since the Global Financial Crisis. We identify 14 "active diversifiers," defined as countries that purchased gold and raised its share in total reserves by at least 5 percentage points over...

The concept of purchasing power parity (PPP) is used to evaluate whether eight East Asian currencies were overvalued on the eve of the 1997 crises. The Johansen and Horvath-Watson cointegration test procedures are applied to bilateral and multilateral exchange rates, deflated using CPIs,...

The canonical predictions of intertemporal open-economy macro models are tested by a structural VAR analysis of Group of Seven countries. The analysis is distinguished from the previous literature in that it adopts minimal assumptions for identification. Consistent with a large set of...

We investigate the long-run relationship between the real exchange rate, traded and nontraded productivity levels, and government spending for 14 OECD countries, using recently developed panel cointegration tests. The results indicate that under certain assumptions it is easier to detect...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the medium-term determinants of current accounts for a large sample of industrial and developing countries. The analysis is based on a structural approach that highlights the roles of the fundamental macroeconomic determinants of saving and...

We reassess exchange rate prediction using a wider set of models that have been proposed in the last decade. The performance of these models is compared against two reference specifications-purchasing power parity and the sticky-price monetary model. The models are estimated in first-difference...

We use data on the extent to which residents of one country hold the bonds of issuers resident in another as a measure of financial integration or interrelatedness, asking how Asia compares with Europe and Latin America and with the base case in which the purchaser and issuer of the bonds reside...

This paper examines some popular explanations for the smooth operation of the pre-1914 gold standard. We find that the rapid adjustment of economies to underlying disturbances played an important role in stabilizing output and employment under the gold standard system, but no evidence that this...