The coincidence of banking and currency crises associated with the Asian financial crisis has drawn renewed attention to causal and common factors linking the two phenomena. In this paper, we analyze the incidence and underlying causes of banking and currency crises in 90 industrial and...

In recent years China has faced an increasing trilemmahow to pursue an independent domestic monetary policy and limit exchange rate flexibility, while at the same time facing large and growing international capital flows. This paper analyzes the impact of the trilemma on China's monetary policy...

Restrictions on international capital transactions and other payments are usually designed to limit volatile short-term capital flows ("hot money") and stabilize the exchange rate. Their imposition, however, may have the opposite effect by inadvertently signaling the continuation of...

Are countries with unregulated capital flows more vulnerable to currency crises? Efforts to answer this question properly must control for "self selection" bias since countries with liberalized capital accounts may also have more sound economic policies and institutions that make them less...

This paper investigates the output effects of IMF-supported stabilization programs, especially those introduced at the time of a severe balance of payments/currency crisis. Using a panel data set over the 1975-97 period and covering 67 developing and emerging-market economies (with 461 IMF...

Central banks actively engage in sterilized foreign exchange market intervention despite numerous empirical studies indicating that these operations do not systematically affect the exchange rate. Are these policies misguided and central bankers irrational? Or is evidence showing the...

We develop an alternative test of the `German view' - that a reduction in government consumption may lead to an immediate private consumption boom - derived from an open-economy permanent income model. In our empirical study we find, in accordance with the `German view', that an anticipated...

This article investigates the effects of macroeconomic policy (monetary and fiscal) on output growth during financial crises characterized by a sudden stop" in net capital inflows in developing and emerging market economies. We investigate 83 sudden stop crises in 77 countries over 1982-2003...

Studies of central bank intervention are complicated by the fact that we typically observe intervention only during periods of turbulent exchange markets. Furthermore, entering the market during these particular periods is a conscious self-selection" choice made by the intervening central bank....

A key challenge for macroeconomic policy in open economies is how to simultaneously manage exchange rates, interest rates and capital account openness - the trilemma. This paper calculates a trilemma index for India and investigates its evolution over time. We find that financial integration has...