Fixed Exchange Rates and Banking Crises: When Does the Former Prevent the Latter?

Because monetary policy is constrained in fixed exchange rate regimes, banks should expect fewer money‐financed bailouts and therefore manage their risks more carefully when exchange rates are fixed than when they are flexible. It follows that we should observe fewer banking crises in countries with formal currency pegs. The 1990s however are littered with occurrences of banking crises in countries with fixed exchange rates. This paper asks whether banks in those countries could have adopted excess risk expecting money‐financed bailouts or whether their pegs discouraged such moral hazard‐type risks.     

What is really common in the run-up to banking crises?

Arguing that crises are similar if they are predictable from historical experience, we employ panel logit models to examine similarities in the run-ups to the current global financial crisis and historical banking crises. Asset bubbles are the most common precursors.     

银行危机与货币危机共生性关系的实证研究

1 997— 1 998年的亚洲金融风暴中 ,银行危机与货币危机的同时爆发 ,即共生性危机的发生引发国际社会与学术界对这种现象的重新思考 :这种共生性现象是否确实具有普遍性 ?从理论的角度来看 ,银行危机与货币危机之间的确存在着一定的联系 ,但到目前为止 ,很少有研究从实证的角度来证明这种联系的确存在。正是基于此 ,本文从实证的角度出发 ,旨在揭示出银行危机与货币危机之间的确存在着相互影响 ,换言之 ,共生性危机的发生是具有显著性的。具体来说 ,本文以 1 975— 2 0 0 0年期间 53个国家危机的发生情况为研究对象 ,分别运用频率分布、信号法 ,以及概率回归模型来分析两种危机的共生性 ,并得到非常一致的结论 :在新兴市场国家中 ,银行危机与货币危机之间的确存在着明显的相互关系 ,同时银行危机更趋向于作为货币危机即将发生的同步或预警指标 ,而反之则不然。     

Narrating Crisis,Constructing Policy: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in Syria

During crises, ideas play a decisive role in shaping radical paradigm shifts in economic governance. However, not all crises immediately produce such ‘great transformations’. Why do some ideas result in incremental rather than abrupt change after crisis? To identify mechanisms potentially explaining this variation, I conduct an exploratory process tracing of an understudied case of incremental institutional change: post-independence Syria. Competing political actors in Syria converged on identical policy responses to crisis despite their very different interpretations of its causes. Although power oscillated between these increasingly bitter rivals in the early 1950s, their ideational consensus on economic issues nevertheless led to a decade of steady institutional change that transformed previously fragile government institutions into powerful vehicles of statism. I derive from this analysis the potential causal significance of two new variables – crisis narrative and crisis response – and hypothesise that their configuration can explain variation in post-crisis patterns of institutional change. Ideas can explain not only the new direction of economic governance after crisis, but also the speed and scale of its movement.     

Sudden stops, banking crises and investment collapses in emerging markets

We evaluate whether financial openness leaves emerging market economies vulnerable to the adverse effects of capital reversals (“sudden stops”) on domestic investment. We investigate this claim in a broad sample of emerging markets during the period 1976–2002. If the banking sector does not experience a systemic crisis, sudden stop events fail to have a significant impact on investment. Bank crises, on the other hand, have a significant negative effect on investment even in the absence of a contemporaneous sudden stop crisis. We also find that openness to capital flows worsens the adverse impact of banking crises on investment. Our results provide statistical support for the policy view that a strong banking sector which can withstand the negative fallout of capital flight is essential for countries that open their economies to international financial flows.     

港英政府应对公共危机管理的现代化开端——以19世纪末20世纪初香港鼠疫为研究对象

公共危机是现代化转型过程中的诸多因素引发的重大危机，对公众利益产生很大的负面影响，公共危机管理是现代政府的重要职能。19世纪末20世纪初香港鼠疫频发，港英政府设立专门的危机管理机构，采取积极有效的措施进行应对，开香港公共危机现代化管理之先河。     

Optimal versus adequate level of international reserves: evidence for Turkey

The determination of international reserve balance for emerging economies is part of the efforts to strengthen the immunity of these economies to crises. However, there is still evidence on crises even for the countries with large foreign reserves. It has usually been experienced that the countries with greatest need for reserves economize more than others on their holdings since they might underestimate the cost of crisis. In this study, the official international reserves of Turkey are tested against optimality and adequacy. During 1988–2002, the actual reserves fell short of both the optimal and the adequate levels. They are only optimal when the expected cumulative contraction is about 5.2% of real GDP under crisis. However, early evidence from emerging economies and Turkey show that crises hit more heavily. Hence, it is found that the current financial structure in Turkey such as the absence of capital controls and a highly dollarized banking system necessitates more foreign reserves for preventing any future economic and/or financial shocks.     

Measuring the end of the European financial crisis

In 2013 it was declared that ‘the eurozone crisis is over’. However, in fact, the series of financial crises since 2008 may have interrupted the process of EMU enlargement, which in turn triggered a continuing crisis of confidence in the euro. In this paper we extend the sigma‐convergence test to provide a more precise understanding of real interest rate parity (RIP) convergence. On the basis of this, we predict the timing for eliminating the cost of economic asymmetric shocks. Our estimation indicates the RIP among EMU members and accessions were still valid after the disruptions of the 2008 financial crisis. However, the situation has been even worse since the 2010 European sovereign debt crisis, and ceteris paribus, symmetry cannot be achieved without further policy actions. This implies that the EMU authority must do its best to strengthen symmetry and thereby solidify the EMU, at which point it will be better able to re‐start the process of enlargement.     

Do Employers' Responses to Crises Impact Men and Women Differently? Firm‐level Evidence from Indonesia

Do employers' responses to crises impact men and women differently? Using manufacturing census data from Indonesia this paper assesses gender differences in the impact of the East Asian crisis and to what extent these were due to differential treatment of men and women within firms and gender sorting across firms that varied in their exposure to the crisis. On average, women experienced higher job losses than their male colleagues within the same firm. However, the aggregate adverse effect of such differential treatment was more than offset by women being disproportionately employed in firms hit relatively less hard by the crisis. The null hypothesis that there were no gender differences in wage adjustment is not rejected.     

行业危机情境下的多组织替代学习研究

危机虽然对组织的运行框架产生破坏作用,但是也可以成为组织学习有价值的来源.针对近年来行业危机频发的现实情况,采用替代学习的理论框架分析了行业内多个组织针对个别组织的危机进行学习的四个阶段.在注意阶段,组织需要选择观察对象及其行为范本;在保持阶段,组织则利用观察到的行为重构心智模式;在动作复现阶段,组织实践他们所学到的内容并不断加以调整;在动机阶段,组织通过强化的方式巩固新的组织实践.此外,在行业危机情境下,这种替代学习不仅需要行业组织自身的努力,更强调各利益相关者在四个阶段的参与、合作和对话.这种社会互动式的多组织共同开展的替代学习对于提升行业危机的治理能力,走出行业危机困境具有重要作用.     

Liberalization,Regulatory Delays and Vulnerability to Systemic Banking Crisis

This work aims at contributing to the improvement of the early warning systems of banking crises using a new approach accounting for model uncertainty. We show that a multinomial logit model based on Bayesian model averaging (BMA) is a good strategy to predict banking crisis. To do this, we argue that differences in vulnerability to banking crisis can be largely explained by an asymmetry between financial market evolution and regulation update on a sample of 49 developed and developing countries between 1980 and 2010. When markets are liberalized, competition pushes bankers to take more risks and take advantage of regulatory delays thus increasing crises probabilities. Our empirical evidence supports that crisis probability is higher in country liberalizing their banking system when regulation is not updated. We developed an early warning system for systemic banking crises based on the multinomial logit model. Its main difference to existing prediction models and its contribution to the literature is that it is intended to identify and resolve what is called by Bussiere and Fratzscher [(2006). Towards a new early warning system of financial crises. Journal of International Money and Finance, 25(6), 953–973] as post-crisis bias in binomial models and to develop a new methodology of leading indicators selection based on BMA. Overall, our model predicts all banking crises during our sample period.     

Bank bailouts and political instability

This paper studies bank solvency crises due to macroeconomic shocks in a model where government is prone to bailout because of cronyism. Citizens can dismiss the government and overrule its decision if they believe that a bailout is not economically justified. The results are as follows. First, the probability of a political crisis in equilibrium increases with the scope of the political principal-agent problem. Second, political uncertainty enlarges the set of parameters for which a banking crisis takes place and thereby increases financial instability. Third, politico-financial crises may stem from foreign lenders' loss of confidence.     

Macroeconomic narratives in a world of crises: An analysis of stories about solving the system crisis

Since the financial crisis in 2008, a series of publications on macroeconomic responses to the compound crises of the economy and the environment have emerged. Under labels such as green new deal, green growth and the great transition, attempts at offering coherent responses to the crises have been made. These responses have in common that they all present a large number of policy proposals for ways in which to solve the current crises and achieve a sustainable economy. This article provides a mapping of a selection of such responses and an analysis of their content. The analysis combines discourse theory and narrative analysis and investigates discourses by studying the narratives they produce. The study thus contributes to the long line of analyses on discourses on sustainable economy: empirically, by investigating and analysing a number of macroeconomic proposals for solving the system crisis, and theoretically, by elaborating on the concept of narrative dynamics in relation to persuasive strength in political decision-making.     

Withstanding financial crises: would trade partners help or hurt?

This article provides new empirical evidence on the losses of real activity caused by various financial shocks. Spillover effects due to foreign trade linkages deserve special attention. To this end, we estimate a modify auto-regressive process and a Seemingly Unrelated Regression Equations estimator is used to account for the dependency of one’s country growth on its trade-weighted partners growth. We run estimations on a set of currency collapses, banking crises and sovereign defaults in 49 advanced and developing countries from 1978 to 2011. The trade-weighted foreign demand effect mitigated the economic downturn following a banking or a sovereign debt crisis in all countries, while only the advanced ones benefited from it after a currency collapse. Trade-based spillover effects make banking crises more costly in the developing countries, in those that liberalize their financial account. It contrasts with what is observed during currency or sovereign debt crises.     

A Reconsideration of the Protectionism Debate: Keynes and Import Controls

One of the most important elements of financial crises is the credit restriction that follows and the immediate consequences it has on investment and employment. In the post-Keynesian vision, an exit from economic crises frequently requires increased demand, specifically through public expenditure and employment. Furthermore, it requires the exploration of various policies and institutional reforms that could counteract the credit rationing emerging from the first moments of the financial crisis, particularly in regard to the financing of small business. This is one of the principal lessons this paper explores when studying a sample of Mexican immigrant entrepreneurs in three cities in the United States, and their conditions of survival amid the financial crisis.     

The constitutional political economy of virtual worlds

In virtual worlds, a social order able to coordinate the actions of tens of thousands of people emerges in a non-predetermined but designed way. The central puzzle the developers of such worlds have to solve is the same political economists face: to establish a well-functioning set of rules allowing for the thriving of the regulated community. The purpose of this paper is to provide a discussion of the particularities of the constitutional political economy of virtual worlds: their institutions, the prevalent beliefs of the players, and their organizations. The main reason why we should care about doing research on virtual worlds is the huge potential for research in virtual worlds. Virtual worlds present a middle ground in the debate between the greater control of laboratory experiments and the higher external validity of the field. Besides being an important cultural phenomenon per se, they emerge as the researchers’ tool to conduct experiments on a truly social level with tens of thousands of subjects. To show the usefulness of such environments for research in political economy in an exemplary but concrete fashion, the paper also presents some findings difficult to be produced elsewhere: data on an astonishingly high percentage of altruistic behavior in a Hobbesian natural state drawn from a dictator game played online.     

Anatomy of a financial crisis

This paper provides an asymmetric information framework for understanding the nature of financial crises. It provides the following precise definition of a financial crisis: A financial crisis is a disruption to financial markets in which adverse selection and moral hazard problems become much worse, so that financial markets are unable to efficiently channel funds to those who have the most productive investment opportunities. As a result, a financial crisis can drive the economy away from an equilibrium with high output in which financial markets perform well to one in which output declines sharply. The asymmetric information framework explains the patterns in the data and many features of these crises which are otherwise hard to explain. It indicates that financial crises have effects over and above those resulting from bank panics and therefore provides a rationale for an expanded lender-of-last-resort role for the central bank in which the central bank uses the discount window to provide liquidity to sectors outside of the banking system.     

Applying the Lessons of Asia: The IMF's Crisis Management Strategy following the Global Financial Crisis

ABSTRACT

The paper reviews the International Monetary Fund's (IMF's) non-concessional lending programs following the global financial crisis, with a view to understanding how the IMF applied the lessons of the Asian crisis in designing its approach to crisis management. For this purpose, the paper focuses on the 2008 programs in Hungary, Iceland, Latvia and Ukraine – the first of its kind since the early 2000s – and compares them with the 1997 programs in Indonesia, Korea and Thailand. Our analysis finds the European programs better funded and their structural conditionality more focused. Other than these, the overall thrust of the programs was similar: fiscal and monetary tightening, coupled with banking reforms. The real difference was not so much about content but about philosophy. Relative to the Asian programs, the European programs were characterized by more emphasis on ownership, greater collaboration among stakeholders, more realistic assumptions and greater transparency about the risks and the logic of policy actions, and more built-in flexibility of targets and policy options. This approach to crisis management incorporated the changes that had been made since the Asian crisis in the IMF's policies and procedures to manage capital account crises more effectively.     

A Model of Balance‐of‐Payments Crises due to External Shocks: Monetary vs. Fiscal Approaches

This paper develops a model for balance‐of‐payments (BOP) crises triggered by an external shock. Whether an external shock induces a BOP crisis depends crucially on the sequence of policy actions taken by the government's monetary and fiscal authorities. If the fiscal authority moves first and imposes an exogenous constraint on the monetary authority, an external shock can lead to a BOP crisis. However, if the monetary authority moves first and imposes an exogenous constraint on the fiscal authority, the same shock does not cause a BOP crisis.     

债务型经济增长:当代发达国家的经济特征

2008年美国金融危机和近年一些发达国家相继发生的主权债务危机,从根本上不同于以往历次危机,展现了当代发达资本主义国家经济的债务化特征,即一方面资本过剩(流动性过剩)推动了金融资本投机性投资,依靠金融创新制造的"财富效应"来刺激虚假的购买力;另一方面,发达国家政府依靠债务来维持其庞大的财政开支。债务型经济增长是不可持续的,终将爆发危机进行强制性调整。