There is a debate on whether some forms of financial flows offer better crisis protection than others. Using a large panel of advanced, emerging, and developing countries during 1970-2003, this paper analyzes the behavior of various types of flows: foreign direct investment (FDI), portfolio...

Conventional estimates of the seigniorage-maximizing inflation rate often make use of the Cagan form, which implies a constant semielasticity of money demand with respect to inflation. This paper shows that the elasticity of substitution in transactions between money and bonds determines how the...

While a number of crises in emerging markets generated widespread contagion in financial markets during the 1990s, more recent crises (notably, in Argentina) have been mostly contained within national borders. This has led some observers to wonder whether contagion might have become a feature of...

Forecasters often predict continued rapid economic growth into the medium and long term for countries that have recently experienced strong growth. Using long-term forecasts of economic growth from the IMF/World Bank staff Debt Sustainability Analyses for a panel of countries, we show that the...

We draw on a newly collected historical dataset of fiscal variables for a large panel of countries—to our knowledge, the most comprehensive database currently available—to gauge the degree of fiscal prudence or profligacy for each country over the past several decades....