Financial globalization had a rocky start in emerging economies hit by Sudden Stops. Foreign reserves have grown very rapidly since then, as if those countries were practicing a New Mercantilism that views foreign reserves as a war-chest for defense against Sudden Stops. This paper conducts a...

This paper proposes a methodology for measuring credit booms and uses it to identify credit booms in emerging and industrial economies over the past four decades. In addition, we use event study methods to identify the key empirical regularities of credit booms in macroeconomic aggregates and...

Theory predicts that a nation's stochastic intertemporal budget constraint is satisfied if net foreign assets (NFA) are integrated of any finite order, or if net exports (NX) and NFA satisfy an error-correction specification with a residual integrated of any finite order. We test these...

We evaluate the merits of the "supply-side" view under which inflation results from sectoral shocks, and compare it with the "classical" view in which inflation results from aggregate factors such as variations in money growth. Using a panel VAR methodology applied to data for 13 GECD countries,...

This paper updates our earlier work (Ahearne, Fernald, Loungani and Schindler, 2003) on whether China, with its huge pool of labor and an allegedly undervalued exchange rate, is hurting the export performance of other emerging market economies in Asia. We continue to find that while exchange...

Our paper analyses the effects of restrictions on capital mobility on the output-inflation tradeoff. Using a stochastic version of the Mundell-Fleming model, we establish a theoretical presumption that an increase in restrictions on capital mobility should make the tradeoff parameter smaller,...

This paper provides evidence on the importance of the credit channel in the transmission of monetary policy. Changes in reserve requirements are used to measure "credit shocks." Reserve requirement changes are often made for regulatory reasons, and hence provide a more exogenous measure of...

Using annual data for 450 manufacturing industries over the period 1958 to 1989, we establish the following stylized facts on the response of industry nominal wage growth to aggregate and industry influences: ; 1. We find support for the canonical wage contracts model outlined in Blanchard and...

In this paper, we document two empirical relationships that have emerged as the former communist countries have taken steps to transform their economies from command systems to market-based systems. First, increased central bank independence has tended to improve inflation performance. Second,...

Do increases in China's exports reduce exports of other emerging Asian economies? We find that correlations between Chinese export growth and that of other emerging Asian economies are actually positive (though usually not significant), even after controlling for trading-partner income growth...