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...

This paper presents a simple modification to the standard IS curve used, at least implicitly, by policymakers that allows capital flight to have a contractionary effect in emerging market economies. In the standard model, capital flight leads to an expansionary shift in the IS curve through an increase in net exports. However, in the presence of liability dollarization for domestic firms, a cur...

Depression (ICD–10 F32, F33 or DSM equivalent) is a common disease. In 1990, in established market economies, depression was estimated to be second only to ischaemic heart disease as a cause of disease burden. It was the largest single cause of non-fatal burden (Murray & Lopez, 1996). It is a disease that often remits and recurs (Andrews, 2001), but does it remit and recur among a restricted nu...

This paper contributes to the literature by empirically examining whether the influence of public debt on economic growth differs between the short and the long run and presents different patterns across euro-area countries. To this end, we use annual data from both central and peripheral countries of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) for the 1960-2012 period and estimate a growth ...

This study investigates the profit efficiency (PROFEFF) of small banks (those under $500 million in total assets) for 1990–96. Assuming that small banks and large banks use the same production technology, we find, consistent with Berger and Mester [J. Bank. Finance 21 (1997) 875], that small banks are more profit efficient than large banks. Small banks in non-metropolitan statistical areas (non...

In this paper we modify the method of Blanchard and Quah (1989) in order to estimate a structural VAR model appropriate for a small open economy. In this way we identify shocks to output and prices in the members of the two monetary unions that make up the African CFA Franc Zone. The costs of monetary union membership will depend on the extent to which price and output shocks are correlated acr...

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...

We use a model of proportionate growth to describe the dynamics of international trade flows. We provide an explanation to the fact that the extensive margin of trade account for a large fraction of the greater exports of large economies, as well as for a number of stylized facts described by the literature on trade networks such as the power-law distribution of connectivity and the fat tails d...

Article history: Received 6 August 2013 Received in revised form 15 February 2014 Accepted 17 February 2014 Available online 5 March 2014 The recent global financial crisis has sparked a renewal of debate on the choice of exchange rate regimes. Creating a tripartite regime classification, the present study examines their determinants for 137 nations spanning the period 1999–2011. I find that tr...