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Journal Article
Financial crises in emerging markets
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 Pacific Basin Monetary and Economic Studies, have been collected in Financial Crises in Emerging Markets (edited by R. Glick, R. Moreno, and M. Spiegel), published in 2001 by Cambridge University Press.
Working Paper
“Conditional PPP” and Real Exchange Rate Convergence in the Euro Area
While economic theory highlights the usefulness of flexible exchange rates in promoting adjustment in international relative prices, flexible exchange rates also can be a source of destabilizing shocks. We find that when countries joining the euro currency union abandoned their national exchange rates, the adjustment of real exchange rates toward their long-run equilibrium surprisingly became faster. To investigate, we distinguish between differing rates of purchasing power parity (PPP) convergence conditional on alternative shocks, which we refer to as ?conditional PPP.? We find that the ...
Working Paper
New results in support of the fiscal policy ineffectiveness proposition
We demonstrate that previous tests of money and fiscal "policy ineffectiveness" are likely to be biased because they ignore interaction effects between policies, induced either by direct policy linkages or through the variation of policies in response to common factors. Our analysis takes into account possible interactive effects between monetary and fiscal policy in an attempt to avoid the biases of previous research. Our empirical analysis of U.S. experience supports the short-run ineffectiveness of anticipated and unanticipated fiscal policy, in contrast to other empirical research, but ...
Working Paper
Replicating and Projecting the Path of COVID-19 with a Model-Implied Reproduction Number
We fit a simple epidemiology model to daily data on the number of currently-infected cases of COVID-19 in China, Italy, the United States, and Brazil. These four countries can be viewed as representing different stages, from late to early, of a COVID-19 epidemic cycle. We solve for a model-implied effective reproduction number Rt each day so that the model closely replicates the daily number of currently infected cases in each country. Using the model-implied time series of Rt, we construct a smoothed version of the in-sample trajectory which is used to project the future evolution of Rt and ...
Working Paper
Navigating the trilemma: capital flows and monetary policy in China
In recent years China has faced an increasing trilemma?how 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 as the country liberalizes its goods and financial markets and integrates with the world economy. It shows how China has sought to insulate its reserve money from the effects of balance of payments inflows by sterilizing through the issuance of central bank liabilities. However, we report empirical ...
Working Paper
Pegged exchange rate regimes -- a trap?
This paper studies the empirical and theoretical association between the duration of a pegged exchange rate and the cost experienced upon exiting the regime. We confirm empirically that exits from pegged exchange rate regimes during the past two decades have often been accompanied by crises, the cost of which increases with the duration of the peg before the crisis. We explain these observations in a framework in which the exchange rate peg is used as a commitment mechanism to achieve inflation stability, but multiple equilibria are possible. We show that there are ex ante large gains from ...
Working Paper
Money and credit, competitiveness, and currency crises in Asia and Latin America
This paper analyzes the role of money, credit, trade and competitiveness variables in signaling currency crises in a sample of East Asian and Latin American countries over the period 1972:01 - 1997:10. Bivariate tests suggest that money and credit, as well as trade and competitiveness variables, appear to behave differently around crisis episodes than they do during periods of tranquility, suggesting that they may help signal currency crises. In multivariate probit regressions, which allow for the identification of marginal contributions of individual variables, reductions in real domestic ...
Journal Article
Asia’s role in the post-crisis global economy
In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007?08, Asia has emerged as a pillar of financial stability and economic growth. A recent San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank conference focused on Asia?s changing role in the global economy. Asia?s relative strength is allowing it to play an expanded part in multilateral responses to the European sovereign debt crisis. And the reforms put in place following the 1997 Asian financial crisis offer models for countries currently trying to stabilize their economies.
Working Paper
Is money still useful for policy in East Asia?
Since the East Asian crises of 1997, a number of East Asian economies have allowed greater exchange rate flexibility and abandoned monetary targets in favor of inflation targeting, apparently because the perceived usefulness of money as a predictor of inflation, i.e. the information content of money, has fallen. In this paper, we discuss factors that are likely to have influenced the stability of the relationship between money and inflation, particularly in the 1990s, and then assess this relationship in a set of East Asian economies. We focus on (1) the stability of the behavior of the ...