In recent years, many developing countries have intervened in foreign exchange markets to offset to some extent the effect on their economies of large capital flows. Often, changes in reserve requirements were used to mitigate the impact of that intervention on domestic money supplies. Because...

We develop a novel system of reclassifying historical exchange rate regimes. One key difference between our study and previous classifications is that we employ monthly data on market-determined parallel exchange rates going back to 1946 for 153 countries. Our approach differs from the IMF...

Two assertions about exchange rate regimes circulate with some frequency in policy circles. The first, the hypothesis of the excluded middle, holds that authorities must either choose perfectly floating exchange rates (preferably anchored by an inflation target for the central bank) or a hard...

Devaluation is an integral part of adjustment in many developing countries, particularly relied upon by countries facing large external imbalances. A devaluation can only reduce trade imbalances if it translates to a real devaluation and if trade flows respond to relative prices in a significant...

Despite the growing support for market-oriented strategies, and for a greater role of private investment, empirical growth models for developing countries typically make no distinction between the private and public components af investment. This paper sheds some light on this important issue by...

The impact of changes in real interest rates on saving and growth is a central issue in development economics. According to one familiar view, a financial liberalization program which increases real interest rates should encourage saving, thereby boosting investment and growth. While such...

This paper develops a model merging the monetary approach to the balance of payments and a neoclassical growth model into a unified framework in which inflation, growth, and the balance of payments are simultaneously determined. The empirical part of the paper presents estimates of the key...

This paper studies how financial turbulence in emerging market countries can spread across borders. We construct indices of “financial globalization” and evaluate the repercussions of turmoil in three emerging markets that experienced financial crises in the late 1990s: Brazil, Russia, and...