external liabilities and crises abstract we examine the determinants of external crises focusing on the role of foreign liabilities and their composition using a variety of statistical tools and comprehensive data spanning 1970 2011 we find that the ratio of net foreign liabilities to gdp is a significant crisis predictor this is primarily due to the net position in debt instruments the effect of net equity liabilities is weaker and net fdi liabilities seem if anything an offset factor we also find that i breaking down net external debt into its gross asset and liability counterparts does not add significant explanatory power to crisis prediction ii the current account is a powerful predictor iii foreign exchange reserves reduce the likelihood of crisis more than other foreign asset holdings and iv a parsimonious probit containing those and a handful of other variables has good predictive performance in and out of sample the latter result stems largely from our focus on external crises sensu stricto

on cross border bank credit and the u s financial crisis transmission to equity markets this paper examines the role played by cross border equity bond and bank credit flows versus international trade in the transmission of the u s financial crisis to equity markets worldwide we estimate vector autoregressive models with exogenous global factors using monthly data on 36 emerging and developed countries the results from an eclectic methodology that includes causality tests generalized impulse responses and forecast error variance decompositions indicate that the crisis is mostly transmitted through bank credit rather than portfolio flows and international trade the results are robust to altering the exogenous versus endogenous vectors of variables to measuring equity prices in u s dollars or local currency to averaging the data across countries versus averaging the parameters from individual country estimation and to redefining the start date of the crisis the findings endorse the use of banking regulation and capital controls as part of the policy toolkit to limit financial vulnerability

tourism welfare and de industrialization in a small open economy this paper investigates the effects of an expansion of tourism on welfare output and factor prices in the host country using a general equilibrium international trade model in the absence of taxes foreign ownership and distortions an increase in foreign visitors will increase welfare only if the price of nontradables increases factor mobility and foreign ownership tend to reduce the gains from tourism while commodity taxes tend to increase them conditions under which an increase in tourism can lead to deindustrialization are also discussed copyright 1991 by the london school of economics and political science

scientific basis for the greenhouse effect the international community may reach agreement to limit carbon emissions as early as i 992 when brazil will host a negotiating convention on climate change europe and japan have already made commitments to place ceilings on future emissions at or below present rates because the cost of switching to alternative fuels could be high with profound implications for long term economic growth especially in developing countries policy action must be based on the view that the science of the greenhouse effect is compelling this essay considers the scientific logic and evidence for the effect from the viewpoint of an economist it draws heavily on the findings of the intergovernmental panel on climate change ipcc i will stress that both the science and the policy discussion so far including by ipcc have focused insufficiently on effects in the very long term on the order of 250 to 300 years

current account balance and dollar standard exploring the linkages abstract this paper examines whether the international role of the dollar as main global reserve currency has contributed to persistent current account imbalances to this end we analyse how central banks accumulation of reserve assets affects the current account balance of both reserve accumulating and reserve providing countries based on a simple portfolio balance model we show theoretically that the global demand for reserve assets by central banks may lower the current account balance of the reserve issuing country our panel data analysis over the period 1970 2009 confirms this hypothesis any dollar of provided reserve assets decreases the us current account by more than one dollar on average the demand for dollar reserves has lowered the us current account by 1 2 percentage points relative to gdp the flip side of this effect is a higher current account balance in reserve accumulating countries these novel findings show that the worldwide demand for international reserves has contributed to the buildup of global imbalances

did foreign exchange holding influence growth performance during the global financial crisis in a context of increased foreign exchange reserves holding from emerging and developing countries this paper investigates the diminishing return of reserves holding assumption over the most severe phase of the global financial crisis 2008q1 2010q4 relying on a panel smooth transition regression model we highlight the differential effect of the accumulation of foreign exchange reserves for a set of financial vulnerabilities variables specifically while reserve accumulation is effective above a critical threshold to cope with vulnerabilities related to the financial channel we show that it becomes less effective beyond a certain threshold for domestic bank vulnerabilities

macroeconomic factors and microlevel bank behavior we analyze the link between banks and the macroeconomy using a model that extends a macroeconomic var for the u s with a set of factors summarizing conditions in about 1 500 commercial banks we investigate how macroeconomic shocks are transmitted to individual banks and obtain the following main findings backward looking risk of a representative bank declines and bank lending increases following expansionary shocks forward looking risk increases following an expansionary monetary policy shock there is however substantial heterogeneity in the transmission of macroeconomic shocks which is due to bank size capitalization liquidity risk and the exposure to real estate and consumer loans

can leading indicators assess country vulnerability evidence from the 2008 09 global financial crisis abstract we investigate whether leading indicators can help explain the cross country incidence of the 2008 09 financial crisis rather than looking for indicators with specific relevance to the recent crisis the selection of variables is driven by an extensive review of more than eighty papers from the previous literature on early warning indicators our motivation is to address suspicions that indicators found to be useful predictors in one round of crises are typically not useful to predict the next round the review suggests that central bank reserves and past movements in the real exchange rate were the two leading indicators that had proven the most useful in explaining crisis incidence across different countries and episodes in the past for the 2008 09 crisis we use six different variables to measure crisis incidence drops in gdp and industrial production currency depreciation stock market performance reserve losses and participation in an imf program we find that the level of reserves in 2007 appears as a consistent and statistically significant leading indicator of who got hit by the 2008 09 crisis in line with the conclusions of the pre 2008 literature in addition to reserves recent real appreciation is a statistically significant predictor of devaluation and of a measure of exchange market pressure during the current crisis we define the period of the global financial shock as running from late 2008 to early 2009 which probably explains why we find stronger results than earlier papers such as obstfeld et al 2009 2010 and rose and spiegel 2009a b 2010 2011 which use annual data

leading indicators of crisis incidence evidence from developed countries abstract we examine which indicators are most useful in explaining the cost of economic crises in eu and oecd countries between 1970 and 2010 to define the dependent variable we combine a measure of costs to the economy which consists of the output and employment loss and the fiscal deficit with a database of crisis occurrence designed specifically for this task we take into account model uncertainty in two steps first for each potential leading indicator we select the relevant prediction horizon by using panel vector autoregression second we identify the most useful leading indicators with bayesian model averaging our results suggest that domestic housing prices share prices and credit growth and some global variables such as private credit constitute important sources of risk

post mortem examination of the international financial network abstract as the recent crisis has forcefully suggested understanding financial market interconnectedness is of a paramount importance to explain systemic risk stability and economic dynamics in this paper we address these issues along two related perspectives first we explore the statistical properties of the international financial network ifn defined as a weighted directed graph where nodes are countries and links represent debtor creditor relationships in equities and short long run debt we investigate whether the 2008 financial crisis has resulted in a significant change in the topological properties of the ifn our findings suggest that the crisis caused not only a reduction in the amount of securities traded but also induced changes in the topology of the network and in the time evolution of its statistical properties this has happened however without changing the disassortative core periphery structure of the ifn architecture second we perform an econometric study to examine the ability of network based measures to explain cross country differences in crisis intensity we investigate whether the conclusion of previous studies showing that international connectedness is not a relevant predictor of crisis intensity may be reversed once one explicitly accounts for the position of each country within the ifn we show that higher interconnectedness reduces the severity of the crisis as it allows adverse shocks to dissipate quicker however being central in the network may make countries that are not members of a rich club more vulnerable in times of crisis finally we find strong evidence of nonlinear effects once the high degree of heterogeneity that characterizes the ifn is taken into account

capital and credit market integration and real economic contagion during the global financial crisis abstract this study investigates the role of financial integration in the spread of global financial crisis in particular this study shows how the effect of the crisis on real business cycle co movement varied for capital and credit market integration using a sample of 58 countries in 2001 2013 during the global financial crisis the united states the epicenter of the crisis experienced a severe downturn in the real economy and other countries followed suit we find that during the global financial crisis the business cycle co movements between the united states and the rest of the world were stronger when the level of capital market integration between them was higher however the co movements were weaker when the level of credit market integration was higher these findings are robust even when including investment channels local fundamental factors endogenous policy responses across countries and alternative measures for financial integration and business cycle co movements

the antecedents and aftermath of financial crises as told by carlos f diaz alejandro some of the best known papers of carlos f diaz alejandro were about latin america s crises in the 1980s and 1930s i show data figures and evidence about the crises in the advanced economies thirty years later that fit the same narrative his unadulterated words aptly describe modern problems across geographical borders and in this case income levels this attests to his timeless insight and understanding because some of the observations he made have general applicability to the study of recurring patterns across crises i have taken the liberty to label these lessons these are primarily lessons about what to avoid

risk management and dynamic network performance an illustration using a dual banking system abstractthis study applies dynamic network data envelopment analysis to compare a dual banking system namely conventional and islamic banks with emphasis on risk measures non oriented variable return to scale dynamic network slacks based measure is used to model the banking performance for the period 2008 2012 under the consideration of risk measures the findings highlight that islamic banks excel in managerial efficiency while conventional banks surpass in profitability efficiency furthermore the regression results find that the number of directors on the risk management committee has a positive impact on banking performance meanwhile the high number of independent directors improves the profitability efficiency but worsens the managerial efficiency

tourism and income distribution evidence from a developed regional economy abstract the ways in which tourism consumption affects income distribution involves three channels changes in prices earnings of households and government revenues in this paper we focus our analysis on the latter two channels through a social accounting matrix sam model of galicia for the year 2008 this sam which is elaborated with a special design for the evaluation of tourism policies incorporates data for a wide variety of households eight different types disaggregated by level of income two governments regional and central four types of taxes four wage earners classified by education skill and 29 sectors among other figures furthermore with the purpose of going deeper into the distributive effects the traditional multiplicative and additive sam multiplier decompositions are presented results show that the positive effects on all income groups are significant however high income households benefit more than low income ones contributing to a slight increase in income inequality within the region

inequality leverage and crises the paper studies how high leverage and crises can arise as a result of changes in the income distribution empirically the periods 1920 1929 and 1983 2007 both exhibited a large increase in the income share of the rich a large increase in leverage for the remainder and an eventual financial and real crisis the paper presents a theoretical model where these features arise endogenously as a result of a shift in bargaining powers over incomes a financial crisis can reduce leverage if it is very large and not accompanied by a real contraction but restoration of the lower income group s bargaining power is more effective

for a few dollars more reserves and growth in times of crises abstract based on a dataset of 112 emerging economies and developing countries this paper addresses the question whether the accumulation of international reserves has effectively protected countries during the 2008 09 financial crisis more specifically the paper investigates the relation between international reserves and the existence of capital controls we find that the level of reserves matters countries with high reserves relative to short term debt suffered less from the crisis particularly when associated with a less open capital account this suggests some degree of complementarity between reserve accumulation and capital controls

how central banks prepare for financial crises an empirical analysis of the effects of crises and globalisation on international reserves central banks international reserve holdings have increased significantly in the recent past while traditional models fail to explain this accumulation of reserves the more recent literature argues that reserves are used as a lifejacket against currency crises however research so far has neglected the question whether and how central banks change their precautionary reserve holdings after the country was affected by a currency crisis this paper tests the hypothesis that central banks revise their reserve policy in the aftermath of currency crises a dynamic panel data model is estimated for developing and industrial countries covering the period from 1975 to 2003 the evidence suggests that currency crises induce a permanent increase of reserves this effect is particularly strong for recent currency crises since the asian financial crisis

predicting currency fluctuations and crises do resident firms have an informational advantage the authors investigate whether resident enterprise managers have an informational advantage about the countries in which they work they propose a method for extracting information available to resident managers but unknown to investors and forecasters they rest their hypothesis of informational advantage using a unique data set the global competitiveness survey the survey asks local managers about their outlook for the country in which they reside they find that local managers do have useful private information local managers responses improve on conventional forecasts of future volatility and changes in the exchange rate which are based on economic fundamentals or interest rate differentials they find that the local business community perceived in advance the recent crises in the republic of korea russia and thailand but not those in indonesia and malaysia markets have had limited success predicting crises and might do better by drawing on private information available to resident enterprise managers who seem to know better than markets about future movements in exchange rates

predicting banking crises with artificial neural networks the role of nonlinearity and heterogeneity studies of the early warning systems ewss for banking crises usually rely on linear classifiers estimated with international datasets i construct an ews based on an artificial neural network ann model and i also account for regional heterogeneity in order to improve the generalization ability of ews models all of the banking crises in my test set are then predictable at a 24 month horizon using information from earlier crises for some countries estimation with a regional dataset significantly improves the predictions the ann outperforms the usual logit regression assessed by the area under the receiver operating characteristics curve

currency crises and institutions abstract this study furthers recent literature on currency crises and institutions the main objective is to re evaluate the causes of currency crises by focusing on the role played by a broader array of institutional factors and crisis episodes than have previously been considered while at the same time controlling for economic factors our dataset consists of over 30 countries covering 13 institutional factors for the period 1984 2002 two questions are addressed they are 1 what mix of institutions may contribute to or set the stage for a currency crisis and 2 what mix of institutions may affect the depth of currency crises as measured by a decline in output our findings reveal that institutional as well as economic factors affect the probability of currency crises and that worse institutions are associated with bigger contractions in output during the crisis in general our strongest results regarding institutions show that corruption a de facto fixed exchange rate regime weak government stability and weak law and order increase the probability of a currency crisis we find mixed evidence that deposit insurance the removal of capital controls a lack of central bank independence financial liberalization and civil law increase the chance of crisis we find a similar set of factors worsens the contraction in output during a crisis except for deposit insurance which we find moderates the contraction in output

a von thunen model of crime casinos and property values in new jersey urban economic models suggest that ceteris paribus land values diminish with distance from a central business district cbd which produces employment income and other amenities a new industry like casino gaming may have jobs and increased income associated with it these amenities will induce an increase in property values the size of that increase diminishes with distance from the city centre the new industry may have the negative by product of crime which is hypothesised to have a reversed although systematic effect upon land values that is it pays to live in the hinterlands far from the source of crime thus theoretically the net effect of amenities as a function of distance from the central city is ambiguous applying the model to atlantic city shows that the casinos have brought jobs additional income and greater real estate values to the region but the positive impact diminishes with distance from the city centre however crime has increased at a rate greater than that which exist

worldwide economic recoveries from financial crises through the decades abstract the profiles of economic recoveries after a financial crisis are identified through a self organizing map covering 104 countries during 1973 2017 first and surprisingly only 55 of the 276 events belong to the usual v u l classification new s shaped bounce back recoveries d oomed ones and double dip m occur in 23 18 and 4 of the cases respectively second the frequencies of profiles vary with the crisis type countries development and location and over time third unlike government spending supporting domestic credit liquidity foreign trade or else the exchange rate after the crisis may help activity bounce back

can leviathan governments mitigate the tragedy of the commons this paper explores the conjecture whether the leviathan motive of politicians to tax for the purpose of raising revenues rather than for benevolent pigovian motives helps to overcome the inefficiency of international pollution spillovers such as in the cases of acid rain and global warming it turns out that this conjecture is true in a static context that captures flow externalities e g acid rain as long as environmental damages are not too high in contrast leviathan motives aggravate the already existing inefficiency in the case of stock externalities e g global warming despite probably high taxes at the beginning

currency crashes in emerging markets an empirical treatment we use a panel of annual data for over 100 developing countries from 1971 through 1992 to characterize currency crashes we define a currency crash as a large change of the nominal exchange rate that is also a substantial increase in the rate of change of nominal depreciation we examine the composition of the debt as well as its level and a variety of other macroeconomic factors external and foreign crashes tend to occur when output growth is low the growth of domestic credit is high and the level of foreign interest rates are high a low ratio of fdi to debt is consistently associated with a high likelihood of a crash

casino tourism economic inequality and housing bubbles abstract potential linkages among tourism inequality and housing are addressed for an integrated analysis in this paper with macao treated as a typical case casino tourism albeit performing as a major key to local economic growth is ultimately vulnerable to external shocks to gambling demand as evidenced by the current sharp downturn in macao we find that faster gaming growth leads to higher income inequality while at the same time both factors are responsible for soaring housing bubbles which constitute the very source of social tensions as in macao casino tourism if not well managed may not be a panacea for all development goals the implication for policy derived from this study is that macao must deal with underlying issues rather than apply palliative measures its market failures may necessitate government interventions to ensure social equity and sustainable tourism

financial instability reserves and central bank swap lines in the panic of 2008 in this paper we connect the events of the last twelve months the panic of 2008 as it has been called to the demand for international reserves in previous work we have shown that international reserve demand can be rationalized by a central bank s desire to backstop the broad money supply to avert the possibility of an internal external double drain a bank run combined with capital flight thus simply looking at trade or short term debt as motivations for reserve holdings is insufficient one must also consider the size of the banking system m2 here we show that a country s reserve holdings just before the current crisis relative to their predicted holdings based on these financial motives can significantly predict exchange rate movements of both emerging and advanced countries in 2008 countries with large war chests did not depreciate and some appreciated meanwhile those who held insufficient reserves based on our metric were likely to depreciate current account balances and short term debt levels are not statistically significant predictors of depreciation once reserve levels are taken into account our model s typically high predicted reserve levels provide important context for the unprecedented u s dollar swap lines recently provided to many countries by the federal reserve this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

leviathan governments and carbon taxes costs and potential benefits abstract this paper addresses positive aspects of the global warming debate that so far has been concerned by and large with normative issues the paper considers a consumers government that appreciates tax revenues as such leviathan in addition to conventional measures of welfare i e carbon taxes serve the dual purpose of correcting for externalities here global warming or more generally a stock externality from energy use and of raising revenues this government faces either a competitive or a perfectly cartelized supply the major findings are 1 i consumers may benefit from a leviathan government that appropriates some of the monopoly rent by deterring preemption to some extent 2 ii the leviathan motive raises initial taxes and thereby lowers initial emissions but increases the long run stock externality in a play with linear strategies 3 iii there exists a continuum of equilibria in nonlinear markov strategies which are however pareto inefficient compared with the linear strategies 4 iv but in case of a binding resource constraint nonlinear strategies are the only feasible ones

forecasting the fragility of the banking and insurance sectors linkages between banks and insurance companies are important when forecasting the fragility of the banking and insurance sectors we propose a novel empirical framework that allows us to estimate unobserved linkages in panel data sets that contain observed regressors we find that taking unobserved common factors into account reduces the root mean square forecasts error of firm specific forecasts by up to 9 of system forecasts by up to 14 and by up to 39 for systemic forecasts of more distressed firms relative to a model based on observed variables only estimates of the factor loadings suggest that the correlation of financial institutions has been relatively stable over the forecast period

the power to tax analytical foundations of a fiscal constitution preface 1 taxation in constitutional perspective 2 natural government a model of leviathan 3 constraints on base and rate structure 4 the taxation of commodities 5 taxation through time income taxes capital taxes and public debt 6 money creation and taxation 7 the disposition of public revenues 8 the domain of politics 9 open economy federalism and taxing authority 10 toward authentic tax reform prospects and prescriptions epilogue notes selected bibliography index

explaining the duration of exchange rate pegs abstract this paper is an empirical investigation of the duration of exchange rate pegs in 16 latin american countries and jamaica we identify factors that influence peg duration using logit analysis the real exchange rate and the level of international liquidity are significant determinants of the monthly likelihood of devaluation structural variables such as the openness of an economy and its geographical trade concentration and political variables such as changes in the executive also significantly affect the likelihood of a devaluation there is some evidence that the likelihood of a devaluation first rises and subsequently declines during the first year of a peg

the determinants of vulnerability to the global financial crisis 2008 to 2009 credit growth and other sources of risk abstract in this paper we identify initial macroeconomic and financial market conditions that help explain the distinct response of the real economy of a particular country to the recent global financial crisis using four measures of crisis severity we examine a data set with over 90 potential explanatory factors employing techniques that are robust to model uncertainty four findings are of particular note first we find empirical evidence for the pivotal role of pre crisis credit growth in shaping the real economy s response to the crisis specifically a 1 increase in pre crisis lending translates into a 0 2 increase in the cumulative loss in real output moreover the combination of pronounced growth in lending ahead of the crisis and the country s exposure to external funding from advanced economies is shown to intensify the real downturn economies with booming real activity before the crisis are found to be less resilient to the global shock buoyant growth in real gdp in parallel with strong growth of credit particularly exacerbated the effects of the recent crisis on the real economy finally we provide empirical evidence on the importance of holding international reserves in explaining the response of the real economy to the crisis the accumulation of international reserves mitigated the harmful effects of financial stress on the real economy in particular when domestic funding via credit is abundant the results are shown to be robust to several estimation techniques including those allowing for cross country spillovers

financial crises lessons from history for today making use of the propensity score matching method we match earlier crises pre 2007 with currently ongoing crises post 2007 the old and new crises are matched in three dimensions the global setting in which they occurred the structure of the economy and the domestic vulnerabilities in the pre crisis period our findings suggest that the euro periphery crises share sufficient commonalities with earlier crises in their pre crisis domestic vulnerabilities the study points to two important conclusions first the euro periphery crises are composed of unique country experiences hence it will not be easily resolved with a one size fits all set of economic policies secondly while each banking crisis has its inherent uniqueness each crisis also shares sufficient commonalities with one or more of the asian 5 1996 97 crises the nordic banking crisis of the early 1990s or the japanese banking crisis of the 1990s thus the extensive knowledge accumulated through these former banking crises can help in designing recovery policies selin sayek and fatma taskin

reserve accumulation and financial crises from individual protection to systemic risk abstract this paper provides a new perspective on the relationship between countries international reserve holdings and financial crises while the local view holds that reserves may prevent domestic crises it overlooks that the accumulation of reserves relaxes the financing constraint of the reserve currency country and may cause a financial crisis in the centre which is transmitted globally according to this global view reserve accumulation might destabilize the international financial system since the crisis affects all countries alike the accumulation of reserves imposes a negative externality on non accumulating countries we integrate this idea in a theoretical model of the optimal amount of reserves and illustrate the gap between local and global optimality the consideration of systemic risk lowers the demand for reserves moreover if a supranational authority determines the optimal level of reserves it internalizes the negative externality and accumulates fewer reserves a macroprudential tax on reserve hoardings might implement the socially optimal solution our calibration analysis shows that these considerations are economically significant they lower the optimal amount of reserves in the benchmark case by 45

the economics of casino gambling america s casino industry expanded rapidly in the 1990s spreading from nevada and atlantic city to mining towns riverboats race tracks and tribal lands and moving from isolated resort settings to urban and suburban venues this article examines economic characteristics of the casino industry including the evolution of major casino markets pricing of gaming products market structures regulatory constraints and social and economic impacts attributable to casinos when competitive casinos show strong economies of scale and scope but many new jurisdictions limit the number or size of operations thus creating substantial economic rents allocation of these rents are fundamentally politically determined

cross country experiences and policy implications from the global financial crisis the financial crisis of 2007 2008 is rooted in a number of factors some common to previous financial crises others new analysis of post crisis macroeconomic and financial sector performance for 58 advanced countries and emerging markets shows a differential impact of old and new factors factors common to other crises like asset price bubbles and current account deficits help to explain cross country differences in the severity of real economic impacts new factors such as increased financial integration and dependence on wholesale funding help to account for the amplification and global spread of the financial crisis our findings point to vulnerabilities to be monitored and areas of needed national and international reforms to reduce risk of future crises and cross border spillovers they also reinforce a sad state of knowledge much of how crises start and spread remains unknown stijn claessens giovanni dell ariccia deniz igan and luc laeven

global warming prices versus quantities from a strategic point of view abstract this paper investigates how the choices of the instruments affect the interactions in a stock externality game global warming between cartelized fossil fuel suppliers and consumers more precisely the paper studies the equilibria in markov strategies in a dynamic game with each player choosing either the quantity or the price strategy including short run first mover advantages indeed opec and its opponent iea have tried both instruments in the past and play currently in quantities given such a non competitive setting both players should prefer the price instrument therefore both players are expected to switch back to price and tax policies if global warming will be treated effectively

international reserves and the maturity of external debt abstract this paper studies how the level of international reserves affects the maturity structure of external debt we show in an illustrative theoretical model that reserves lengthen the maturity of external debt via a flattening of the yield curve using data of 66 emerging and developing countries and applying different econometric approaches we find robust evidence that reserves increase the share of long term in total external debt results hold for private and public external debt individually taking reserves and their effect on the debt maturity structure together they reinforce financial stability

currency crises are they all the same abstract the plethora of currency crises around the world has fueled many theories on the causes of speculative attacks the first generation models focus on fiscal problems while the second generation models emphasize countercyclical policies and self fulfilling crises in the 1990s models pinpoint to financial excesses with the crisis of argentina in 2001 models of sovereign default have become popular again while the theoretical literature has emphasized variety the empirical literature has supported the one size fits all models this paper contributes to the empirical literature by assessing whether the crises of the last 30 years are of different varieties

analyzing industry level vulnerability by predicting financial bankruptcy this study introduces a novel framework for building company bankruptcy models and a methodology for assessing the vulnerability of industrial economic activities we consider the identification of bankruptcy as a classification problem and assume that bankruptcy criteria differ across industries we build highly accurate industry bankruptcy models by constructing separate models for each industry we also propose a method of analyzing the vulnerability of industrial economic activities in various countries and industries using new indicators we call expected potential loss which we obtain using the predicted likelihood of bankruptcy and company information jel g0 c0

do weak institutions prolong crises on the identification characteristics and duration of declines during economic slumps this paper studies periods of prolonged contractions in output per capita in a sample of 145 countries from 1950 to 2014 economic slumps are defined as abrupt interruptions of a period of growth by several regime switches slumps start with a sharp contraction along with a trend break which is followed by another switch when growth stabilizes again the paper then analyzes the correlates of these slumps focusing on the length and depth of the contraction from the beginning of the slump to its trough the results establish three new stylized facts i weak political institutions predate crises whereas political reforms tend to follow them ii the length and depth of economic declines are robustly correlated with executive constraints and ethnic heterogeneity and iii there is a robust interaction between these two variables suggesting that institutions constraining leaders are important for stabilizing growth this is particularly relevant for sub saharan africa where politics are often ethnic and decision makers are comparatively unconstrained

leading indicators of fiscal distress evidence from extreme bounds analysis early warning systems ewss are widely used to assess a country s vulnerability to fiscal distress a fiscal distress episode is identified as a period when government experiences extreme funding

capacity investment preemption and commitment in an infinite horizon model the commitment value of capacity is analyzed in an infinite horizon duopoly model the paper focuses on the role of alternative behavioral assumptions about the ability of firms to commit to investment paths each firm s investment strategy in a feedback nash equilibrium is shown to be a decreasing function of its rival s current capacity this creates an incentive for a firm to expand its capacity to preempt subsequent rival investment in a precommitment equilibrium there are no incentives to invest preemptively as a consequence steady state capacity levels are greater in a feedback nash equilibrium than in a precommitment equilibrium copyright 1987 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

towards a new early warning system of financial crises abstract this paper develops a new early warning system ews model based on a multinomial logit model for predicting financial crises it is shown that commonly used ews approaches which use binomial discrete dependent variable models are subject to what we call a post crisis bias this bias arises when no distinction is made between tranquil periods when economic fundamentals are largely sound and sustainable and crisis post crisis periods when economic variables go through an adjustment process before reaching a more sustainable level or growth path we show that applying a multinomial logit model which allows distinguishing between more than two states is a valid way of solving this problem and constitutes a substantial improvement in the ability to forecast financial crises the empirical results reveal that for a set of 20 open emerging markets for the period 1993 2001 the model would have correctly predicted a large majority of crises in emerging markets

exchange rate regimes and the cross country distribution of the 1997 financial crisis robin m grier we study variations in the severity of the 1997 financial crisis in a sample of 25 developing countries we use both currency depreciation and stock market returns as crisis measures our key findings are that countries that started 1997 with an exchange rate peg experienced significantly greater currency depreciation and significantly lower stock returns than would be predicted from the levels of various macroeconomic indicators jel f3 f4 i introduction the asian financial crisis of 1997 is still a very hot topic a recent search of econlit turned up 243 articles in the system with asian crisis in the subject field 1 several recent articles attempt to explain variations in the severity of the crisis across developing countries using macroeconomic and financial variables and show that the distribution of the crisis is somewhat predictable our article extends this literature in two directions first we examine whether the initial exchange rate regime in place at the beginning of 1997 had any effect on the distribution of the financial crisis once the relevant macro and financial indicators are included in the model second given that a real crisis followed on the heels of the financial one we study the relationship between exchange rate regime currency depreciation and stock market performance in 1997 our sample consists of 25 developing countries in 1997 2 though a cross sectional approach limits the generality of our results we believe we can ask and answer two interesting questions about the average performance of different exchange rate regimes in 1997 the first question is controlling for economic indicators what was the average effect of having an initially pegged exchange rate on currency depreciation there are theoretical arguments presented in section ii that can justify either positive negative or zero effects we find that on average countries with a pegged regime at the beginning of the year experienced more depreciation than what was predicted by their macro indicators the second question we study is what was the average effect of currency depreciation on stock market performance in 1997 again there are arguments presented in section iii supporting either a positive negative or neutral relationship we find that on average depreciation has a marginally significant negative impact on stock returns however in the 12 countries that began 1997 with a floating exchange rate currency depreciation had a significantly positive effect on stock returns whereas the effect of depreciation on stock returns was negative and significant for the 13 countries that started the year with a pegged currency this relationship holds for stock returns measured either in u s dollars or in local currencies the papers most similar to ours in the literature are tornell and velasco 1995 edwards 1993 corsetti et al 1999 hereafter cpr and tornell 1999 tornell and velasco and edwards study whether or not the choice of exchange rate regime affects economic outcomes 3 cpr and tornell study the asian financial crisis of 1997 in the broader context of developing country performance they create a crisis index and estimate several regressions using macro and financial indicators to predict the extent of the crisis in a sample of developing countries our article applies the idea that the choice of exchange rate regime can affect macroeconomic and financial outcomes to the study of the determinants of the severity of the 1997 crisis in a model similar to those of cpr and tornell in what follows below section ii studies the relationship between macro and financial indicators the initial exchange rate regime and currency depreciation in 1997 section iii considers the depreciation exchange rate regime stock market connection in 1997 section iv presents our conclusions ii macro indicators currency depreciation and exchange rate regime in 1997 the question of what exactly determines the value of the exchange rate is an important unsolved issue in open economy macroeconomics and we are not going to settle it here

cross country causes and consequences of the crisis an update abstract we update rose and spiegel forthcoming rose and spiegel 2010 and search for simple quantitative models of macroeconomic and financial indicators of the great recession of 2008 09 we use a cross country approach and examine a number of potential causes that have been found to be successful indicators of crisis intensity by other scholars we check a number of different indicators of crisis intensity and a variety of different country samples while countries with higher income and looser credit market regulation seemed to suffer worse crises we find few clear reliable indicators in the pre crisis data of the incidence of the great recession countries with current account surpluses seemed better insulated from slowdowns

predicting currency crises abstract in recent years a number of researchers have claimed success in systematically predicting which countries are more likely to suffer currency crises most notably kaminsky lizondo and reinhart 1998 this paper evaluates the klr approach to anticipating currency crises and develops and tests an alternative first we try to answer the question if we had been using the klr model in late 1996 how well armed would we have been to predict the asia crisis second we analyze a more general probit based model of predicting currency crises in the process we test several basic assumptions underlying the indicators approach

exchange market mayhem the antecedents and aftermath of speculative attacks exchange market mayhem the antecedents and aftermath of speculative attacks this paper evaluates the causes and consequences of episodes of turbulence in foreign exchange markets using data from 1959 through 1993 for twenty oecd countries we consider the antecedents and aftermath of devaluations and revaluations flotations fixings and speculative attacks which may not be successful we find that realignments of fixed exchange rates are alike devaluations are preceded by political instability budget and current account deficits and fast growth of money and prices revaluations are mirror images of devaluations speculative attacks resemble devaluations but money growth and inflation are more endemic and there is no last minute attempt to tighten monetary policy in contrast few consistent correlations link regime transitions like flotations or fixings to macroeconomic or political variables transitions between exchange rate regimes are largely idiosyncratic and are neither consistently provoked ex ante by systematic imbalances nor typically justified ex post by subsequent changes in policy we conclude that there are no clear early warning signals of many speculative attacks and no easy solutions for policy makers barry eichengreen andrew k rose and charles wyplosz

joint implementation strategic reactions and possible remedies this paper investigates the promising proposal of joint implementation ji to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions this was ultimately the only concrete outcome of the conference on climate change in berlin albeit restricted to a pilot phase the basic idea given the public s awareness of global warming sounds economically plausible the industrialized countries the only ones required to stabilize and lower carbon emissions can search for cheaper reductions of greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries and economies in transition however this proposal leads to strategic reactions by developing countries reinforced by the fact that this cheating coincides with the interest of the industrialized country in short this proposal will lead to cheating given asymmetric information and will thus produce largely faked reductions in emissions on the constructive side an efficient mechanism retaining the spirit of ji is derived which deters strategic reactions this differs from a usual principal agent problem through an additional hierarchical layer a global authority e g the conference of parties on climate change an industrialized country and a developing country the unavoidable loss that is even associated with an optimal scheme due to strategic behavioural reality the first best optimum is unattainable except at the top leads of course to much less glamorous predictions in emission reductions moreover the implicit subsidization scheme focuses and favours on already efficient partners

are currency crises predictable abstract this paper studies whether exchange rate expectations and overvaluations are predictors of currency crises the results suggest that overvaluation has predictive power in explaining the crises however although expected depreciation obtained from survey data partially takes different exchange rate misalignment measures into consideration expectations fail to anticipate currency crises

foreign effects of higher u s interest rates abstract this paper analyzes the spillovers of higher u s interest rates on economic activity in a large panel of 50 advanced and emerging economies we allow the response of gdp in each country to vary according to its exchange rate regime trade openness and a vulnerability index that includes current account foreign reserves inflation and external debt we document large heterogeneity in the response of advanced and emerging economies to u s interest rate surprises in response to a u s monetary tightening gdp in foreign economies drops about as much as it does in the united states with a larger decline in emerging economies than in advanced economies in advanced economies trade openness with the united states and the exchange rate regime account for a large portion of the contraction in activity in emerging economies the responses do not depend on the exchange rate regime or trade openness but are larger when vulnerability is high

inequality saving and global imbalances a new theory with evidence from oecd and asian countries global imbalances are attributable to savings deficiency in some economies and savings glut in others the recent global crisis has triggered widespread social conflict over income inequality the inequality saving link has again become a pressing issue needing serious attention we present a new theory to explain why the link between inequality and saving is negative in oecd countries but positive in emerging asia we also offer an econometric analysis of differences in inequality saving links between those economies we find that aggressive financial services lead to a negative link by creating income illusion for overconsumption but imperfect financial markets contribute to a positive link by interacting with industrial policies as part of growth strategies while ignoring liquidity constraints on consumption

did established early warning signals predict the 2008 crises abstract over the past 60 years a voluminous literature has painstakingly developed crises theories and their associated early warning signals the hallmark of this literature is the consistency with which selected early warning signals such as the level of reserves and exchange rate appreciations are presumed to predict different types of crises across countries and time the diversity of crises theories that motivate early warning signals presents however a challenge to empirical implementations given that the true model of early warning signals is unknown omitted variable bias contaminates estimates and confidence levels when the uncertainty surrounding a particular theory has been ignored after addressing model uncertainty in early warning signal regressions using an extended version of frankel and saravelos 2012 j int econ 87 216 231 dataset we do not find a single early warning signal that alerts to all dimensions of the 2008 crisis instead distinct sets of early warning signals identify different dimensions of the crisis banking balance of payments exchange rate pressure and recession

developing an early warning system to predict currency crises abstract the purpose of this paper is to develop an early warning system to predict currency crises in this study a data set covering the period of january 1992 december 2011 of turkish economy is used and an early warning system is developed with artificial neural networks ann decision trees and logistic regression models financial pressure index fpi is an aggregated value composed of the percentage changes in dollar exchange rate gross foreign exchange reserves of the central bank and overnight interest rate in this study fpi is the dependent variable and thirty two macroeconomic indicators are the independent variables three models which are tested in turkish crisis cases have given clear signals that predicted the 1994 and 2001 crises 12 months earlier considering all three prediction model results turkey s economy is not expected to have a currency crisis ceteris paribus until the end of 2012 this study presents uniqueness in that decision support model developed in this study uses basic macroeconomic indicators to predict crises up to a year before they actually happened with an accuracy rate of approximately 95 it also ranks the leading factors of currency crisis with regard to their importance in predicting the crisis