A model of the domestic financial intermediation of foreign capital inflows based on agency costs is developed for studying financial crises in emerging markets. In equilibrium, the banking system becomes progressively more fragile under imperfect prudential regulation and public sector loan guarantees until a crisis occurs with a sudden reversal of capital flows. The crisis evolves endogenously as the banking system becomes increasingly vulnerable through the renegotiation of loans after idiosyncratic firm-specific revenue shocks. The model generates dynamic relationships between foreign capital inflows, domestic investment, corporate debt and equity values in an endogenous growth model The model's assumptions and implications for the behavior of the economy before and after crisis are compared to the experience of five East Asian economies. The case studies compare three that suffered a crisis or near-crisis, Thailand and Malaysia, to two that did not, Taiwan Province of China and Singapore, and lend support to the model.

This paper sheds new light on the external and domestic dimension of China's exchange rate policy. It presents an open economy model to analyze both dimensions of macroeconomic adjustment in China under both flexible and fixed exchange rate regimes. The model-based results indicate that persistent current account surpluses in China cannot be rationalized, under general circumstances, by the occurrence of permanent technology or labor supply shocks. As a result, the understanding of the macroeconomic adjustment process in China requires to mimic the effects of potential inefficiencies, which induce the subdued response of domestic absorption to permanent income shocks causing thereby the observed positive unconditional correlation of trade balance and output. The paper argues that these inefficiencies can be potentially seen as a by-product of the fixed exchange rate regime, and can be approximated by a stochastic tax on domestic consumption or time varying transaction cost technology related to money holdings. Our results indicate that a fixed exchange regime with financial market distortions, as defined above, might induce negative effects on GDP growth in the medium-term compared to a more flexible exchange rate regime.

In recent times, the prices of internationally-traded commodities have reached record highs and are expected to continue growing in the foreseeable future. This phenomenon is partially driven by strong demand from a small number of emerging economies, such as China and India. This paper places the recent commodity price boom in historical context, drawing on an investigation of the long-term time-series properties, and presents unique features for 33 individual commodity prices. Using a new methodology for examining cross-sectional variation of commodity returns and its components, we find strong evidence that the prices of world primary commodities are extremely volatile. In addition, prices are roughly 30 percent more volatile under floating than under fixed exchange rate regimes. Finally, using the capital asset pricing model as a loose framework, we find that global macroeconomic risk components have become relatively more important in explaining commodity price volatility.