The Falsification of Four Popular Hypotheses About the Asian Crisis

Various claims have been made about the causes of the Asian crisis and its spread. Here, we use data on the behaviour of capital flows during the crisis to test the strong forms of four such hypotheses, that portfolio investors and hedge funds played a dominant role in initiating and/or spreading the crisis; that moral hazard kept efficient markets from predicting the crisis; and, finally, the common lender hypothesis of Kaminsky and Reinhart. In the process we also test implications of the Calvo-Mendoza model of rational investor ignorance. All are falsified as monocausal explanations. For example, portfolio investments that could not have been subject to substantial moral hazard continued to flow into Asia until very shortly before the crisis. Likewise, banks were a much larger source of capital outflows during the crisis than were portfolio investors. While falsified in their strongest forms, several of these hypotheses in less strong forms should play a role in a more nuanced analysis. It is necessary to move past simple single-factor approaches in order to produce a more complete, synthetic explanation of this episode.