Recent interest in futures contracts on emerging market currencies has raised concerns among some central bank authorities about their ability to maintain stable currencies. This paper presents empirical results examining the influence of the Mexican peso, the Brazilian real, and the Hungarian...

Recent interest in futures contracts on emerging market currencies has raised concerns among some central bank authorities about their ability to maintain stable currencies. This paper presents empirical results examining the influence of the Mexican peso, the Brazilian real, and the Hungarian...

The paper aims to describe the behavior of the Swiss Franc - Deutsch Mark exchange rate between January 1980 and December 1998. Contrary to research results provided for other currencies a random walk is not sufficient to describe the empirical characteristics of the Swiss Franc. A regime...

This paper investigates the behavior of the risk premium on the Swiss stock market. The risk premium consists of two components, which are estimated separately: the amount of volatility and the unit price of risk. By estimating a bivariate GARCH-M model the volatility of the Swiss market is...

The application of a SWARCH model to stock market returns allows one to endogenously determine the regime dependence of the stock market volatility. Comparison of the results from a sample of daily data from five major stock markets shows that the majority of the markets switch regimes...

We identify current challenges for creating stable, yet efficient financial systems using lessons from recent and past crises. Reforms need to start from three tenets: adopting a system-wide perspective explicitly aimed at addressing market failures; understanding and incorporating into...

This paper explores the private- and public-sector responses to the crisis and some of the probable outcomes. Aside from improved supervision of individual institutions, greater emphasis needs to be put on financial regulations that reflect the systemic nature of financial risks and the role...