Exchange market pressure (EMP) measures the pressure on a currency to depreciate. It adds to the actual depreciation a weighted combination of policy instruments used to ward off depreciation, such as interest rates and foreign exchange interventions, where the weights are their effectiveness. The key difficulty in the literature is how to identify these weights. We exploit the persistence of p...

Throughout the 1990s, four global waves of financial turmoil occurred. The beginning of the 21st century has also suffered from several crisis episodes, including the severe subprime crisis. However, to date, the forecasting results are still disappointing. This paper examines whether new insights can be gained from the application of the SelfOrganizing Map (SOM) – a non-parametric neural netwo...

Currency crises tend to affect countries in geographic proximity. This suggests that regional patterns of international trade are important in understanding how currency crises spread, above and beyond any macroeconomic phenomena. Using data for five different currency crises (in 1971, 1973, 1992, 1994, and 1997) we show that currency crises affect countries tied together by international trade...

Recent emerging market crises have emphasized the fluctuating character of trade’s reaction after financial crises, in contradiction with the apparently simple theoretical impact of such events on trade, which is essentially described by the well-known J-curve mechanism.. We use a gravity-like equation to assess the impact of these events on bilateral sectoral trade and reveal the elements whic...

Structural shifts characterize the volatility of the Korean stock and foreign exchange markets during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. This paper employs an unrestricted bivariate GARCH-M model of stock market returns to investigate empirically the effects of daily currency depreciation on Korean stock market returns. The evidence shows that currency depreciation significantly affects stock mar...

In this paper we critically review the literature on the political economy of monetary policy emphasizing the questions opened by the recent …nancial crisis. We begin with a discussion of the issue of rules versus discretion. We then examine the independence of Central banks both in normal times and in crisis and in relation to the political cycles. Finally we address international institutiona...

Sudden stops can be characterized by sharp reversals in capital inflows, large declines in output, and steep collapses in real asset prices (Mendoza and Smith, 2009). In almost all recent crises, capital account reversals amounting to more than 10% of an afflicted country’s GDP have occurred (Calvo and Reinhart, 1999 and Nabli, 1999). More specifically, reversals in capital flows to emergin...

A financial crisis is typically a rare kind of an event, but it hurts sustainable economic development when it occurs. This study proposes a multiscale neural network learning paradigm to predict financial crisis events for early-warning purposes. In the proposed multiscale neural network learning paradigm, currency exchange rate, a typical financial indicator that usually reflects economic flu...

This paper analyzes the causes and consequences of the financial crisis in East Asia. We have examined which of the two alternatives--panic or fundamentals--was a crucial feature. While our empirical analysis is inconclusive on the relative importance of the two views, it suggests that the massive inflow of foreign capital into the region during the 1990s was at the center of the East Asian fin...

Using panel data for 68 countries over the period 1975-2002 this paper examines how IMF programs, disbursed loans, and compliance with conditionality affect the risk of currency crises and the outcome of such crises. Specifically, we investigate whether countries with previous IMF intervention are more likely to experience currency crises. In a second step, we analyze the IMF’s impact on a coun...