how important is regional vs global scope an examination of u s multinationals beginning with rugman and verbeke j int bus stud 35 1 3 18 2004 several international business ib scholars have proposed that most large multinationals are not global but regional this argument has recently been challenged for both its conceptualization and its implementation we aim to contribute to this debate by revisiting the definitions of regional and global by leveraging data from the u s bureau of economic analysis that is new to this literature and by analyzing multinationals scope in terms of both sales and production we find that u s multinationals are significantly more global than has previously been acknowledged in the ib literature

inflation and reputation in many macroeconomic models with rational expectations optimal policy is time inconsistent and therefore announced policy may not be credible this paper models the government s credibility explicitly using kreps and wilson s analysis time consistent optimal government policy emerges as a sequential equilibrium in a repeated game this policy is at least as good as the inconsistent optimal policy and dominates the consistent policy when reputational effects are ignored thus the analysis resolves the problem of specifying a credible optimal policy in such models the results show why attempts to disinflate may lead to recession even with perfectly flexible prices this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

spillovers through banking centers a panel data analysis of bank flows abstract this paper presents evidence that spillovers through bank lending contributed to the transmission of currency crises during the recent episodes of financial instability in emerging markets the innovation of the paper is that it looks beyond aggregated measures of contagion into the structure of bank flows disaggregating by banking centers the main findings are that spillovers caused by banks exposures to a crisis country help predict flows in third countries after the mexican and asian crises but not after the russian crisis in the latter there is evidence of a generalized outflow from emerging markets the importance of spillovers through banking centers suggests that countries might reduce contagion risk by diversifying the sources of their financing and by carefully monitoring borrowing from creditors exposed to potential crisis countries

sulfur dioxide control by electric utilities what are the gains from trade title iv of the 1990 clean air act amendments caaa established a market for transferable sulfur dioxide so2 emission allowances among electric utilities this market offers firms facing high marginal abatement costs the opportunity to purchase the right to emit so2 from firms with lower costs and this is expected to yield cost savings compared to a command and control approach to environmental regulation this paper uses econometrically estimated marginal abatement cost functions for power plants affected by title iv of the caaa to evaluate the performance of the so2 allowance market specifically we investigate whether the much heralded fall in the cost of abating so2 compared to original estimates can be attributed to allowance trading we demonstrate that for plants that use low sulfur coal to reduce so2 emissions technical change and the fall in prices of low sulfur coal have lowered marginal abatement cost curves by over 50 percent since 1985 the flexibility to take advantage of these chan

financial contagion through capital connections a model of the origin and spread of bank panics financial contagion is modeled as an equilibrium phenomenon in a dynamic setting with incomplete information and multiple banks the equilibrium probability of bank failure is uniquely determined we explore how the cross holding of deposits motivated by imperfectly correlated regional liquidity shocks can lead to contagious eects conditional on the failure of a financial institution we show that contagion is possible in the unique equilibrium of the economy and characterize exactly when it may exist at the same time we identify a direction of flow for contagious eects which provides a rationale for localized financial panics simulations identify the optimal level of interbank deposit holdings in the presence of contagion risk our results suggest that when the probability of bank failure is low maximal levels of interbank holdings are optimal when cross holding of deposits is complete we demonstrate that the intensity of contagion is increasing in the size of regionally aggregate liquidity shocks

contagion of self fulfilling financial crises due to diversification of investment portfolios abstract we look at two countries that have independent fundamentals but share the same group of investors each country might face a self fulfilling crisis agents withdrawing their investments fearing that others will a crisis in one country reduces agents wealth this makes them more averse to the strategic risk associated with the unknown behavior of other agents in the second country increasing their incentive to withdraw their investments consequently the probability of a crisis there increases this generates a positive correlation between the returns in the two countries since diversification affects returns in our model its welfare implications are non trivial

measuring international capital mobility a review many barriers to the international movement of capital across national boundaries have been dismantled over the course of the last 20 years financial integration was greatly enhanced by the removal of capital controls on the part of the united states germany canada switzerland and the netherlands after 1973 the recycling of surpluses to developing countries through the euromarkets in the 1970 s the removal of capital controls in the united kingdom and japan beginning in 1979 financial integration among european community countries including france and italy in preparation for 1992 recent moves toward financial liberalization in smaller countries in the pacific and the steady process of technical and institutional innovation that has proceeded around the world some popular tests of international capital mobility however appear to show anomalous results martin feldstein and charles horioka upset conventional wisdom in 1980 when they concluded that changes in countries rates of national saving had very large effects on their rates of investment and interpreted this finding as evidence of low capital mobility the argument

currency crises sunspots and markov switching regimes abstract this paper investigates the theoretical properties of a class of escape clause models of currency crises as well as their applicability to empirical work we show that under some conditions these models give rise to an arbitrarily large number of equilibria as well as cyclic or chaotic dynamics for the devaluation expectations we then propose an econometric technique based on the markov switching regimes framework by which these models can be brought to the data we illustrate this empirical approach by studying the experience of the french franc between 1987 and 1993 and find that the model performs significantly better when it allows the devaluation expectations to be influenced by sunspots

firm specific assets and the link between exchange rates and foreign direct investment foreign direct investment fdi theory and empirical studies have generated mixed support for a link between exchange rates and fdi this paper argues that exchange rate movements may affect acquisition fdi because acquisitions involve firm specific assets which can generate returns in currencies other than that used for purchase using data on japanese acquisitions in the united states across three digit sic industries from 1975 to 1992 maximum likelihood estimates from discrete dependent variable models support the hypothesis that real dollar depreciations make japanese acquisitions more likely in u s industries particularly those which more likely have firm specific assets copyright 1997 by american economic association

measuring sovereign risk spillovers and assessing the role of transmission channels a spatial econometrics approach abstract we contribute to the literature on international risk spillovers by developing a unified framework based on spatial econometrics that enables us to address the following questions i what are the effective transmission channels real linkages and informational channels of international risk spillovers across countries and or regions ii what are the most dominant ones and iii which countries are most at risk for their environment and which are suffering the most from international exposure our analysis based on 41 advanced and emerging economies from 2008q1 to 2012q4 shows that among the considered channels for explaining international spillovers of sovereign bond spreads the informational channel is of utmost importance our results challenge previous findings from the literature in which the empirical strategy did not accommodate altogether important features of country spillovers such as the co existence of multiple transmission channels in the presence of contemporaneous and time lagged interactions ultimately our stress testing analysis reveals important insights on countries prone either to international spillovers international exposure or both at the regional and the worldwide level

many roads lead to rome implications of geographic scope as a source of isolating mechanisms studies examining the competitive implications of geographic scope have largely focused on creating competitive advantage in an attempt to investigate a less illuminated role of geographic scope that of sustaining competitive advantage this paper investigates the sources of and relationships among the causal factors leading to creation of isolating mechanisms or barriers to imitation this paper first distinguishes two sources of causal factors linked to the creation of isolating mechanisms intrinsic characteristics of knowledge and geographic scope of knowledge acquisition and then investigates the relationships among the causal factors from the two sources employing the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method this paper examines equifinality and functional equivalence of causal factors from the two sources empirical analyses with united states patent and trademark office patent data of the semiconductor industry corroborate the main thesis of the paper that multiple paths can lead to the creation of isolating mechanisms and in these paths causal factors from the two sources of isolating mechanisms can be functionally equivalent the results also provide managerial implications that firms with different sets of resources and capabilities can implement different types of isolating strategies to sustain their competitive advantage

the effectiveness of monetary policy anchors firm level evidence analyses of monetary policy posit that exchange rate pegs inflation targets and central bank independence can help anchor private sector inflation expec tations yet there are few direct tests of this argument we offer cross national micro level evidence on the effectiveness of monetary anchors in controlling private sector inflation concerns using firm level data from eighty one countries approximately 10 000 firms we find evidence that international anchors exchange rate commit ments correlate significantly with a substantial reduction in private sector concerns about inflation while domestic anchors inflation targeting and central bank inde pendence do not our conjecture is that private sector inflation expectations are more responsive to exchange rate anchors because they are more transparent more con straining and more costly than domestic anchoring arrangements the literature on monetary policy highlights the role of monetary institutions in stabilizing private sector inflation expectations central bank independence cbi inflation targeting it and fixed exchange rates pegs are widely viewed as insti tutions that have the capacity to mitigate private sector concerns that policymak ers will exploit them after they have locked in their price wage and investment decisions while other empirical research explores the institutional correlates of inflation and its variability yielding mixed results we use firm level data in our study to directly assess the impact of monetary anchors on private sector inflation concerns we find evidence that pegs mitigate firm owners concerns with infla tion but that domestic anchors such as it and cbi are uncorrelated with our micro indicators of inflation expectations considerable research has investigated the use of it cbi and pegs as institu tions that establish monetary policy credibility whereas these anchors are expected

importing credibility through exchange rate pegging this paper employs an optimal taxation framework in order to study the credibility of monetary policy making in an open economy since inflation is in part uncontrollable due to stochastic disturbances the authority s actions cannot be monitored perfectly when the exchange rate floats thus implying that reputational forces may become ineffective in contrast pegging the nominal exchange rate to a low inflation currency allows perfect monitoring because the exchange rate is in principle controllable for this reason exchange rate pegging may import credibility and result in the best reputational equilibrium even though the authority retains the discretion to devalue unexpectedly

on crises contagion and confusion abstract since the tequila crisis of 1994 1995 the asian flu of 1997 and the russian virus of 1998 economists have been busy producing research on the subject of contagion yet few studies have examined empirically through which channels the disturbances are transmitted if there are indeed fundamental reasons for the spillovers we observe we attempt to fill this gap by analyzing how both trade links and the largely ignored financial sector links influence the pattern of fundamentals based contagion we examine the role of international bank lending the potential for cross market hedging and bilateral and third party trade in the propagation of crises

offshoring administrative and technical work new fields for understanding the global enterprise in this paper we introduce the journal of international business studies special issue on offshoring administrative and technical services ats in doing so we have attempted to locate the topic within the international business research tradition as well as suggest challenges and opportunities that the phenomenon offers to theoretical and empirical research in the field we examine the interplay of costs knowledge and innovation in the evolution of ats offshoring from modest beginnings to its current stature as an accepted business practice we suggest that understanding the continuing evolution of ats offshoring requires researchers to take into account not only the business imperative of cost saving but also a more complex set of underlying factors and potential outcomes we argue that the rapid growth of ats offshoring has brought about an accumulation of resources including financial flows knowledge infrastructure and human capital to create new platforms for knowledge creation and innovation low costs may characterize the initial conditions for offshoring but they also provide the basis for up market moves as firms increasingly pursue innovation based strategies we introduce the papers in the special issue as integral elements in our discussion contributing new ideas that stimulated our thinking and hopefully will do the same for others seeking to understand this emerging area of globalization and international managerial practice journal of international business studies 2009 40 887 900 doi 10 1057 jibs 2009 22

the dynamics of optimal gradual stabilizations inflation inertia may be quite tenacious because of the simultaneous interaction between policy actions and inflationary expectations under imperfect credibility this result is particularly relevant for understanding some of the failed efforts to stabilize inflation in south america this article deals with the issue of inertia in the framework of imperfect information about the type of the policymaker and extends the existing models to an infinite horizon because policymakers do not have perfect control of inflation a frivolous stabilizer may deviate from the policies of a serious stabilizer without necessarily being unmasked immediately when the difference in the ability of strong and weak policymakers to control inflation is large unexpected inflation may be persistently negative for quite a while thus causing reduced economic activity and giving the indication that credibility is low if the policymaker persists with the stabilization this pattern gradually disappears as his reputation rises but before this final stage the serious policymaker has to compromise his inflation objective in view of adverse expectation about this type and pay the cost of imperfect credibility

regionalization of r d activities dis economies of interdependence and inventive performance abstract this paper examines the impact of the extent of the regionalization of mnes r d activities on their inventive performance by joining the regionalization theory with the recombinant view of invention we challenge the implicit assumption that all foreign knowledge seeking activities will necessarily offer new knowledge to the firm we introduce the dis economies of interdependence defined as the dis advantages that the firm derives due to the interdependence among countries within a region as a new theoretical mechanism explaining the benefits and costs of regionalization our analysis of global pharmaceutical firms shows that an inverted u shaped relationship exists between the number of regions in which a firm has r d activities and its inventive performance our results also indicate that a firm s recombinant capability moderates the inverted u shaped relationship in such a way that when a firm s recombinant capability is high it reaches its turning point in a larger number of regions and the inverted u shaped relationship is flatter these results underscore that recombinant capability significantly influences the firm s ability to derive benefits and reduce costs from the regionalization of its r d activities our findings suggest that it is through the consideration of the dis economies of interdependence that offers the essential reasoning needed to unwind the inferred assumption that all foreign knowledge seeking activities will offer access to new knowledge

equilibrium political budget cycles political business cycle theories generally rely on nominal rigidities and voter myopia this paper offers an equilibrium theory that preserves some basic insights from earlier models though with significant refinements the political budget cycle emphasized here is in fiscal policy rather than output and inflation it arises via a multidimensional signal process one can consider the welfare implications of proposals to mitigate the cycle and the effects of altering the electoral structure copyright 1990 by american economic association

domestic alliance networks and regional strategies of mnes a structural embeddedness perspective we draw on a social network perspective to explain multinational enterprises mnes propensity to distribute their operations unevenly across various regions of the world we focus on how the positioning of mnes in their domestic network of strategic alliances affects their geographic scope i e whether they concentrate on their home region or expand beyond it we theorize that embeddedness in alliance networks constitutes a double edged sword to the geographic scope of mnes strong embeddedness in domestic alliance networks drives the development of location bound firm specific advantages fsas which may narrow down mnes geographic scope in contrast moderate embeddedness leads to more non location bound fsas which reduce liability of foreignness and hence motivate mnes to widen their geographical scope we thus predict a non linear relationship between domestic alliance network embeddedness and mne geographic scope furthermore the impact of the domestic alliance network on mne geographic scope hinges on the organizational ability to efficiently and effectively absorb resources stemming from the network we test our hypotheses using fdi data from 302 us mnes in the information and communication technology industry for the period of 2001 2008 and generally find robust support for the hypothesized relationships

the political economy of monetary institutions in recent decades countries have experimented with a variety of monetary institutions including alternative exchange rate arrangements and different levels of central bank independence political economists have analyzed the choice of these institutions emphasizing their role in resolving both the time inconsistency problem and dilemmas created by an open economy this first generation work however suffers from a central limitation it studies exchange rate regimes and central bank institutions in isolation from one another without investigating how one monetary institution affects the costs and benefits of the other by contrast the contributors to this volume analyze the choice of exchange rate regime and central bank independence together and in so doing present a second generation of research on the determinants of monetary institutions the articles incorporate both economic and political factors in explaining the choice of monetary institutions investigating how political institutions democratic processes political party competition and interest group pressures affect the balance between economic and distributional policy objectives

new frontiers in international strategy this paper studies a new frontier in the understanding of international strategy is to explore it we propose the analogy of the ecology of firms and places as a way to emphasize that the real problem is the colocation of different places with different types of firms locations are in fact the distinctive content of international business strategy we deal with this problem with four different perspectives first differences across countries must be addressed with integrative frameworks able to represent the multidimensionality of semiglobalization or intermediate states between total localization and total integration second differences in the development of intermediary markets in a particular place influence firm positioning and industry structure in that place but their impact also crosses different places and it is endogenous to the ecology of places and firms in a systemic integrative way that makes simplifications extremely risky in the design of competitive strategy in an international context third places firms and strategies form a complex ecology that can be studied with a framework focused in understanding the geography strategy link that incorporates different levels of analysis new economic actors and a set of primitives finally firms around the ecology of places face the challenge of developing strategies and business models to serve the majority of humanity today excluded from world trade it is a fundamentally different way to think about the ecology of places and firms overall we present an intriguing new frontier with the capacity to impact both research and practice in the field of international strategy based in understanding the interplay among firms and places

governance matters iii six dimensions of governance are estimated covering 199 countries and territories for four periods 1996 1998 2000 and 2002 the indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance drawn from 25 data sources constructed by 18 organizations these individual measures are assigned to categories capturing key dimensions of governance an unobserved components model is used to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods point estimates of the dimensions of governance are provided as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods methodological issues are also addressed including tests for potential biases and the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors for the indicators the data and a web based graphical interface are available online at www worldbank org wbi governance govdata2002 index html

research on international business problems and prospects this paper reflects on the general problems and specific opportunities faced by contemporary research on multinational enterprise the general problems include controlling properly for the firm s opportunities when testing the effectiveness of its policy choices avoiding biases that result from studying surviving business units and ignoring those that disappeared and mobilizing longitudinal data and exploiting the many census based data sets now coming available

extending the theory of the multinational enterprise internalization and strategic management perspectives this paper assesses the continued relevance of buckley and casson s 1976 book on the future of the multinational enterprise mne against a background of increasing criticism of transaction cost related scholarly work we demonstrate that the schism that can currently be observed in the field between international business and international management is misguided as the transaction cost internalization school may offer useful insights to both management scholars and managers for this to occur however it is necessary first to extend the empirical scope of transaction cost based reasoning to include the functioning of differentiated network mnes the paper suggests that buckley and casson s book still represents a beacon of clarity and a superb starting point for the study of the mne even if the complexity of this governance structure has grown far beyond what any international business scholar or even international management scholar could have predicted 25 years ago

how weak are the signals international price indices and multinational enterprises international price indices ipis provide the most timely and comprehensive market information available to international business how do multinational enterprises mnes affect the validity of ipis we review the earlier debate over methods for calculating ipis which concluded that unit values were inferior to specification prices although most governments produce only unit value indexes we explore three ways in which mnes can affect the validity of ipis determining the representative transfer price excluding intrafirm transactions from the index and choosing the right transfer price along the transportation chain we argue that mne activities strengthen the case for specification prices although still uncommon they are the stronger signal of international markets our empirical analysis supports this hypothesis finding that a 10 increase in the intrafirm trade share of us imports widens the gap between specification price and unit value by 1 3 with transfer price manipulation further increasing the gap journal of international business studies 2004 35 61 74 doi 10 1057 palgrave jibs 8400069

is the international business research agenda running out of steam this research note challenges international business researchers to think of their future work in terms of the past achievements of their discipline it identifies three key research areas corresponding to attempts to tackle crucial empirical questions the explanation of foreign direct investment the multinational firm and the globalization of business it ends by considering the future research agenda

gold monetization and gold discipline gold and its price have emerged as frequent topics of both academic and government debate 2 public attention focused on the gold market since gold s price began fluctuating violently in 1980 and 1981 has turned to gold as a possible means of removing some discretion inherent in the current fiat money system since lack of adherence to monetary rules can lead to problems of dynamic policy inconsistency academic economists have begun seriously to reconsider monetary standards based either on gold or on some other commodity as politically feasible methods of establishing rules 3

the structural reshaping of globalization implications for strategic sectors profiting from innovation and the multinational enterprise the rapid reshaping of the global economic order requires fundamental shifts in international business scholarship and management practice new forms of protectionist policies new types of internationalization motives and new tools of techno nationalism may lead to what we call bifurcated governance at the macro level and value chain decoupling at the micro level as a result innovation networks will require novel reconfigurations we examine the emerging constraints on multinational enterprises imposed by a bifurcated world order we also discuss how the dynamic capabilities framework can guide scholars and managers alike to achieve new forms of evolutionary fitness

optimal accommodation by strong policymakers under incomplete information abstract this paper examines the optimal behavior of a policymaker who is able to precommit labelled strong when the public entertains the possibility that he is either strong or weak unable to precommit the main result is that in the presence of doubts about their type it is optimal even for strong policymakers to partially accommodate inflationary expectations this contrasts with vickers 1986 who finds that when strength is conceived in terms of the relative concern for employment the strong policymaker inflates less under incomplete than under full information the paper also provides a theory of endogenous announcements

semiglobalization and international business strategy if markets were either completely isolated by or integrated across borders there would be little room for international business strategy to have content distinctive from mainstream strategy but a review of the economic evidence about the international integration of markets indicates that we fall in between these extremes into a state of incomplete cross border integration that i refer to as semiglobalization more specifically most measures of market integration have scaled new heights in the last few decades but still fall far short of economic theory s ideal of perfect integration the diagnosis of semiglobalization does more than just supply a relatively stable frame of reference for thinking about the environment of cross border operations it also calls attention to the critical role of location specificity in the prospects of distinctive content for international business strategy relative to mainstream business and corporate strategy in addition it flags factors products subject to location specificity as being salient from the perspective of international business finally it highlights the scope for strategies that strive to capitalize on the large residual barriers to cross border integration as well as those that simply try to cope with them

legal theories of financial development this paper describes and empirically ex amines legal theories of international differences in financial development the law and finance theory stresses that legal traditions differ in terms of 1 their emphasis on the rights of private property owners vis a vis the state and 2 their ability to adapt to changing commercia l and financial conditions so that historically determined legal traditions shape financial deve lopment today other theories reject the centrality of legal tradition in accounting for cross country differences in financial development the results are broadly consistent with legal th eories of financial development though it is difficult to identify the precise channel through which legal tradition influences financial development

foreign direct investment and regulatory remedies for banking crises lessons from japan can regulatory interventions alleviate financial crises if so which ones work we draw inferences from the japanese banking crisis of the 1990s using a hand gathered database of bank loans gathered from original sources our results indicate that whereas risk based capital infusions in japan similar to those following the 2009 supervisory capital assessment program stress tests in the us were successful in stimulating aggregate lending by japanese banks earlier blanket infusions comparable to the 2008 troubled asset relief program tarp in the us were not effective moreover changes in accounting rules in japan that revalued bank assets similar to the relaxation of mark to market requirements for banks in the us did not increase aggregate japanese bank lending but rather reallocated it capital constraints during the crisis also induced many japanese banks to close their overseas branches and switch their charters from international to domestic this endogenous charter switch reversed the process of foreign direct investment fdi for many japanese banks therefore we use the japanese banking crisis as a natural experiment to test fdi theories and find empirical support for the relative access hypothesis but not for the industrial organization approach or for the relative wealth hypothesis

checks and balances private information and the credibility of monetary commitments the authors develop and test several new hypotheses about the anti inflationary effect of central bank independence and exchange rate pegs in the context of different institutions and different degrees of citizen information about government policies theory provides strong reason to believe that while central bank independence will prove more effective as a commitment mechanism in countries where multiple players in government have veto power checks and balances the number of veto players will have no effect on the credibility of exchange rate pegs conversely the authors argue that central bank independence does not solve the problems of commitment that arise when citizens are imperfectly informed about the contribution of government policy to inflation exchange rate pegs however mitigate these problems the authors present extensive evidence from cross country tests using newly developed data that provide strong support for their propositions

transparency reputation and credibility under floating and pegged exchange rates this paper shows that if the cost of importing foreign inflation and real exchange rate shocks are not too high then the equilibrium nominal exchange rate regime for a country with a credibility problem is a peg under which credibility is higher and inflation is lower than under a float this holds true although devaluations of the pegged rate are assumed to be costless the reason is that as realized inflation is not perfectly controllable planned inflation under a float is private information in contrast since the exchange rate can be perfectly controlled pegging resolves the private information problem is more transparent and makes reputation more effective

u s banks crises and bailouts from mexico to ltcm this paper investigates the impact on bank stock prices of emerging market currency crises and bailouts the stock market distinguishes between banks with exposure to a crisis country and other banks in general banks with exposures to a crisis country are affected adversely by currency events and positively by bailouts other banks are mostly unaffected by events in countries experiencing a crisis the paper uses the impact of the ltcm crisis on bank stock prices to put the emerging market events in perspective the ltcm crisis had no significant contagion effects in the banking sector either but banks that participated in the ltcm rescue experienced negative stock returns when the rescue was announced this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a primer on financial contagion abstract this paper presents a theoretical framework to highlight possible channels for the international transmission of financial shocks we first review the different definitions and measures of contagion adopted by the literature we then use a simple multi country asset pricing model to classify the main elements of the current debate on contagion and provide a stylized account of how a crisis in one country can spread to the world economy in particular the model shows how crises can be transmitted across countries without assuming ad hoc portfolio management rules or market imperfections finally tracking our classification we survey the results of the empirical literature on contagion

on the credibility of alternative exchange rate regimes abstract most anti inflation plans have used a nominal exchange rate anchor even though many other variables can serve this role the conventional wisdom is that an exchange rate anchor imposes more macroeconomic discipline than other anchors though theory does not yet provide any clear reason why this is so we explain the link between an exchange rate anchor and discipline with a model that assumes that the public can monitor the nominal exchange rate more easily that it can the other variables in our model a barro gordon game of incomplete information with imperfect monitoring we show that serious stabilizers prefer more visible anchors such as the nominal exchange rate we also show that in some circumstances serious stabilizers will choose to fix the exchange rate even when fixed exchange rates have some costs such as diminished capabilities to respond to external shocks

contagion and trade why are currency crises regional abstract 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 any macroeconomic phenomena we provide empirical support for this hypothesis using data for five different currency crises in 1971 1973 1992 1994 and 1997 we show that currency crises affect clusters of countries tied together by international trade by way of contrast macroeconomic and financial influences are not closely associated with the cross country incidence of speculative attacks

reputation in a model of monetary policy with incomplete information abstract previous models of rules versus discretion are extended to include uncertainty about the policymaker s type when people observe low inflation they raise the possibility that the policymaker is committed to low inflation type 1 this enhancement of reputation gives the uncommitted policymaker type 2 an incentive to masquerade as the committed type in the equilibrium the policymaker of type 1 delivers surprisingly low inflation with corresponding costs to the economy over an extended interval the type 2 person mimics this outcome for awhile but shifts eventually to high inflation this high inflation is surprising initially but subsequently becomes anticipated

exchange rate regimes and independent central banks a correlated choice of imperfectly credible institutions theory and empirical evidence show that low inflation is a precondition for economic growth independent central banks and fixed exchange rates are institutional mechanisms that help keep inflation low by lending monetary policy credibility to governments however the two institutions are commonly analyzed as substitutes that tie the hands of inflation prone governments thus the literature has difficulties describing why governments would adopt both institutions and the interaction between them this paper presents a model that allows policymakers the simultaneous choice of monetary institutions and shows that imperfectly credible institutions will overlap when exchange rates are fixed but adjustable and central bank independence is not fully ascertainable governments choose both institutions more generally the paper generates hypotheses about the conditions that make fixed exchange rates and independent central banks complements or substitutes thus contributing to an explanation of the diversity of global monetary institutions in the post bretton woods period

regionality revisited an examination of the direction of spread of currency crises abstract what determines the direction of spread of currency crises we examine data on waves of currency crises in 1992 1994 1997 and 1998 to evaluate several hypotheses on the determinants of contagion we simultaneously consider trade competition financial links and institutional similarity to the ground zero country as potential drivers of contagion to overcome data limitations and account for model uncertainty we utilize bayesian methodologies hitherto unused in the empirical literature on contagion in particular we use the bayesian averaging of binary models that allows us to take into account the uncertainty regarding the appropriate set of regressors we find that institutional similarity to the ground zero country plays an important role in determining the direction of contagion in all the emerging market currency crises in our dataset we thus provide persuasive evidence in favour of the wake up call hypothesis for financial contagion trade and financial links may also play a role in determining the direction of contagion but their importance varies amongst the crisis periods

the theory and practice of regional strategy a response to osegowitsch and sammartino we are grateful to osegowitsch and sammartino for their critical analysis of our work on the regional and global strategies of multinational enterprises mnes in this response we demonstrate that changing the quantitative thresholds for classifying mnes as global vs non global has no bearing on our earlier conclusions first very few global firms exist second scholarly reflection on regional vs global mne strategy requires substantive extensions of extant international business theory

exchange rate proclamations and inflation fighting credibility if governments choose economic policies that often run counter to their public commitments are those commitments meaningless we argue that govern ment proclamations can be critical in signaling economic policy intentions we focus on the realm of exchange rate policy in which countries frequently implement an exchange rate regime that differs from the officially declared regime we argue that the official exchange rate regime is one of the most important signals of a government s economic policy preferences when a government makes a de jure public commit ment to a fixed exchange rate it sends a signal to domestic and international markets of its strict monetary policy priorities in contrast a government that proclaims a floating exchange rate signals a desire to retain discretion over monetary policy even if it has implemented a de facto fixed rate we use data on 110 developed and devel oping countries from 1974 to 2004 to test two hypotheses first that governments that adopt de facto fixed exchange rates will experience less inflation when they back up their actions with official declarations and second that governments that abide by their commitments as demonstrated by a history of following through on their public declarations of a fixed exchange rate regime will establish greater inflation fighting credibility within developing countries democratic institutions enhance this credibility results from fixed effects econometric models provide strong support for our hypotheses

alliances in international governmental organizations regional trade agreement formation and multinational enterprise regionalization strategy abstract drawing from political science alliance theories we explain why countries are likely to enter regional trade agreements we argue that the probability that this will happen is higher if the countries are allies in the same international governmental organizations igos as such alliances can help build trust and reduce political risk our results show that igo scope and also partner reliability and influence in the igo network play important roles our findings provide guidance to multinational enterprises in formulating regionalization strategies

information based contagion and the implications for financial fragility abstract this paper explores a global game model of information based financial contagion by revealing information on a common fundamental factor and thereby affecting the behavior of creditors the failure of a single firm can trigger the failure of another firm the model provides a unique equilibrium framework to assess the consequences of contagion and yields some hitherto unnoticed insights while contagion increases the correlation among the financial failures of different firms its impact on the incidence of failure is ambiguous i consider an analytically tractable version of the model in which the effect on the ex ante failure probabilities is exactly zero moreover the impact of contagion increases with the relevance of a common underlying fundamental but is limited to firms near the brink of success or failure