This paper analyzes competing interpretations for the large increases in the hoarding of international reserves by developing countries. While the first phase of the rapid hoarding of reserves in the aftermath of the East Asian crisis has been dominated by self insurance against exposure to...

The paper assesses the costs and benefits of active international reserve management (IRM), shedding light on the question of how intense should IRM be for an emerging market. In principle, an active IRM strategy could lower real exchange rate volatility induced by terms of trade shocks; provide...

A Growing share of Emerging Markets (EMs) use hybrid versions of inflation targeting (IT) that differ from the IT regimes of OECD countries. Policy interest rates among commodity countries are impacted by real exchange rate and international reserves (IR) changes, aiming at stabilizing their...

I. International reserves escrow accounts: Managing international reserves provides an effective mechanism for self insurance. The hazard of this mechanism is that international reserves are easy prey for opportunistic policy makers in polarized countries characterized by political instability....

This paper studies the experience of Latin-America [LATAM] with financial liberalization in the 1990s. The rush towards financial liberalizations in the early 1990s was associated with expectations that external financing would alleviate the scarcity of saving in LATAM, thereby increasing...

This paper investigates the association between commercial and financial openness of developing countries. The data suggest that, controlling for GDP/Capita changes and allowing for country specific effects, increase in a developing country's (exports + imports)/GDP is associated with a highly...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of the deepening presence of multinationals in emerging markets on the cost of macroeconomic volatility there. We find that macroeconomic volatility has a potentially large impact on employment and investment decisions of multinationals...

This paper evaluates the empirical evidence of increasing the chances of financial crises induced by opening up developing countries to short-term capital inflows, and appraises the various proposals made for mitigating the severity of financial crises. We point out that there is solid evidence...

This paper studies the endogenous determination of pricing to market, in a model with time dependent transportation costs, where the future terms of trade are random. Allowing time dependent transportation costs adds a dimension of investment to the pre-buying of imports, implying that financial...

The purpose of this paper is to explain the reluctance of developing countries to open up their capital market to foreigners, and the conditions inducing an emerging market economy to switch its policies. We consider an economy characterized initially by a one-sided openness to the capital...