account deficit to widen most dramatically in the earlier period when it was easily financed. Countries that used policy and in some cases, perhaps, enjoyed good luck that allowed them to limit the rise in the real exchange rate and the growth of the current account deficit in the boom period suffered the smallest reversals. This provides some intuition for how it was that the same countries could complain about quantitative easing while it was underway – QE had large, disconcerting impacts on local markets – and then also complain about tapering talk. Talk of tapering had a relatively large negative impact on those local markets that earlier allowed their asset prices to run up sharply and their current accounts to widen relatively dramatically.

We interpret these real exchange rate and current account measures as picking up the impact, positive, negative or neutral, of macroprudential policy broadly defined. Recall that we control for the stance of fiscal policy (since fiscal tightening can also limit the appreciation of asset prices in a period when capital is flowing in). In addition, we control for the intensity of capital controls in the prior period. These, similarly, do not appear to have exerted a consistently significant impact on the effects of tapering. Nor does their inclusion alter the estimated effect of the change in the real exchange rate. Evidently, neither capital controls, nor fiscal tightening, nor even a combination of the two, sufficed to damp down the effects of financial inflows. Instead, a broader array of macroprudential policies – limits on the rate of growth of bank lending, loan-to-value regulation for the mortgage market, and similar measures – may have made a difference by moderating either the upward pressure on the exchange rate or the widening of the current account deficit, and may therefore be called for in the future.

# 2. **Data**

In what follows we consider the impact of tapering on exchange rates, foreign reserves and stock prices, but we also calculate composite indices of overall capital market pressure. These indices are constructed as a weighted average of changes in exchange rates, reserves and stock market yields. These indices are constructed in a manner analogous to the exchange market pressure index of Eichengreen, Rose and Wyplosz (1995), which is a weighted average of changes in exchange rates, reserves, and policy interest rates, where the weights were the inverses of the standard deviation of each series. We first create this index using data for exchange rate and reserve losses, and then add the negative of the changes in stock yields (denoting the two versions Index 1 and Index 2, respectively).<sup>2</sup> For the weights, we calculate the standard deviations for each series using monthly data from January 2000 to August 2013. The weights are then the inverses of the standard deviations (see Appendix B).

Most of the data definitions and sources will be familiar. We calculate changes in the real exchange rate using data for the nominal exchange rate with respect to the US dollar and the consumer price index for the subject country and the United States. Alternatively, we use data for real effective exchange rates from the _Global Economic Monitor_ database of the World Bank and the _International Financial Statistics_ of the International Monetary Fund, although the latter covers far fewer countries. It turns out that exchange rate data constructed using different sources are highly correlated and in practice make little difference for our results. We therefore report the results using the data for bilateral real exchange rate in the regressions reported here. We

> 2 We also did the same including changes in sovereign bonds yields and credit default swaps spreads, but these are available for far fewer countries (not all the countries in the sample having well-functioning government bond markets).

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