Currency crises tend to be regional; they affect countries in geographic proximity. This suggests that patterns of international trade are important in understanding how currency crises spread, above and beyond and macroeconomic phenomena. We provide empirical support for this hypothesis. Using...

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...

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 Economic Letter briefly reviews 11 papers that provide analytical perspectives and new empirical evidence on the causes of these crises as well as the appropriate policy responses. These papers, prepared for a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Center for...

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 1975–1997 period and covering 67 developing and emerging market economies (with 461 IMF...

This paper examines episodes of banking sector distress for a large sample of developed and developing countries, highlighting the experience of Japan. By a host of criteria, Japan appeared to be in a stronger position than most countries at the onset of banking problems - low inflation,...

Tests for contagion in financial returns using correlation analysis are seriously affected by the size of the “noncrisis” and “crisis” periods. Typically the crisis period contains relatively few observations, which seriously affects the power of the test.

Why are some currency crises followed by economic contractions while others are not? This paper is an attempt at answering this query. In particular, we investigate two closely related questions. First, we explore whether there is a difference in the output effects of a devaluation during...

The paper is concerned with exchange rate instability, by which we mean large changes in exchange rates. The paper has two objectives. First, we search for plausible determinants of currency crashes. To do this we examine annual panel data for a large sample of developing countries. The work is...

In this paper, we provide a theoretical explanation of why financial liberalization is likely to generate financial crises in emerging market economies. We first show that under financial repression the aggregate capital stock and bank net worth are both likely to be low. This leads a newly...