The evidence supporting the presence of output losses associated with sovereign defaults is based on annual observations and suffers from measurement and identification problems. This paper examines the impact of default on growth using quarterly data and finds that output contractions precede...

In recent years, the term “fear of floating” has been used to describe exchange rate regimes that, while officially flexible, in practice intervene heavily to avoid sudden or large depreciations. However, the data reveals that in most cases (and increasingly so in the 2000s) intervention has...