Currency crises that coincide with banking crises tend to share at least three elements. First, banks have a currency mismatch between their assets and liabilities. Second, banks do not completely hedge the associated exchange rate risk. Third, there are implicit government guarantees to banks and their foreign creditors. This paper argues that the "rst two features arise from banks' optimal re...

What drives countercyclical volatility? A large literature has documented that many economic variables are more disperse in recessions, but this could either occur because shocks get bigger or because …rms respond more to shocks which are the same size. Existing evidence that the dispersion of endogenous variables rises in recessions cannot tell us which of volatility or responsiveness is getti...

The Interactions between Debt and Currency Crises – Common Causes or Contagion? In contrast to the well-known twin currency and banking crises the literature has so far neglected a second type of twin crises, the simultaneous occurrence of currency and debt crises. The decision of a government to devalue and/or to default is closely interlinked through the government’s intertemporal budget cons...

African economies are facing the critical challenge of raising the rate of GDP growth and sustaining high growth rates and thus meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The performance of agriculture is more paradoxical and African exports of industrial goods are dominated by mining and crude oil. The financial systems remain largely underdeveloped both in terms of the size and range of fi...

The breakdown of the Bretton Woods system and the adoption of generalized ‡oating exchange rates ushered in a new era of exchange rate volatility and uncertainty. This increased volatility lead economists to search for economic models able to describe observed exchange rate behavior. In the present paper we propose more general STAR transition functions which encompass both threshold nonlineari...

Recent research has revealed a wealth of information about the microeconomics of currency markets and thus the determination of exchange rates at short horizons. This information is valuable to us as scientists since, like evidence of macroeconomic regularities, it can provide critical guidance for designing exchange-rate models. This paper presents an optimizing model of short-run exchange-rat...

This paper developes a small open economy model in which domestic resource shocks play a vital role in driving the dynamics of the major macroeconomic aggregates. Households rent capital and labour to rms and have access to an international bond market. The model is calibrated to recent Icelandic data and simulated under two alternative exchange rate regimes: oating rates, and monetary union me...

Given that a multinational enterprise can react flexibly upon exchange rate movements, international trade flows may be interpreted as an option. An enterprise will opt to export if the profits obtained from exporting under given exchange rate developments are greater than if foreign subsidiary sales were opted. Naturally, given negative exchange rate scenario situations, an enterprise will cho...

We assess the behavior of real effective exchange rates (REERs) of members of the CEMAC zone with respect to their long-term equilibrium paths. A reduced form of the fundamental equilibrium exchange rate (FEER) model is estimated and associated misalignments are derived for the period 1980 to 2009. Our findings suggest that for majority of countries, macroeconomic fundamentals have the expected...

Standard tests of the Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson (HBS) hypothesis treat productivity levels in and across countries as fixed and observable, and offer little empirical support for the hypothesis. If productivity follows a jump-diffusion process, these standard tests will generate biased estimates, measuring productivity levels with error. This paper instead proposes an ‘errors in variables’ appro...