Leading Indicators Of Currency Crises

This paper examines the empirical evidence on currency crises and proposes a specific early warning system. This system involves monitoring the evolution of several indicators that tend to exhibit an unusual behavior in the periods preceding a crisis. When an indicator exceeds a certain threshold value, this is interpreted as a warning “signal” that a currency crisis may take place within the following 24 months. The variables that have the best track record within this approach include exports, deviations of the real exchange rate from trend, the ratio of broad money to gross international reserves, output, and equity prices.

This paper examines the empirical evidence on currency crises and proposes a specific early warning system. This system involves monitoring the evolution of several indicators that tend to exhibit an unusual behavior in the periods preceding a crisis. When an indicator exceeds a certain threshold value, this is interpreted as a warning quot;signalquot; that a currency crisis may take place within the following 24 months. The variables that have the best track record within this approach include exports, deviations of the real exchange rate from trend, the ratio of broad money to gross international reserves, output, and equity prices.

This paper examines the empirical evidence on currency crises and proposes a specific early warning system. This system involves monitoring the evolution of several indicators that tend to exhibit an unusual behavior in the periods preceding a crisis. When an indicator exceeds a certain threshold value, this is interpreted as a warning "signal" that a currency crisis may take place within the following 24 months. The variables that have the best track record within this approach include exports, deviations of the real exchange rate from trend, the ratio of broad money to gross international reserves, output, and equity prices.

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: The banking and currency crises of the last two decades inflicted substantial financial, economic, and social damage on the countries in which they originated. In this work, the efficiency of early warning indicators for these disastrous economic events is evaluated. An analysis of the traditional and recent literature on currency crises is performed in order to extract potential early warning indicators that are suggested by theory. Alongside others, these candidate indicators are tested in alternative empirical studies that are reviewed in this work. The results are mixed, but somewhat encouraging for further research in this field. Furthermore, the analysis is extended to a critique of systems of early warning indicators currently used by international institutions. Inhaltsverzeichnis:Table of Contents: 1.Introduction1 2.The Currency Crisis Literature as a Reference Point for the Identification of Early Warning Indicators4 2.1The Traditional Theory5 2.2Second Generation Models11 2.3A Cross-generation Framework Proposition19 2.4Early Warning Indicators as Suggested by Theory22 3.The Empirical Assessment of Early Warning Indicators24 3.1Univariate Indicators for Financial Crises24 3.1.1Cross-Country Regressions26 3.1.2Multivariate Probit Models35 3.1.3The Signals Approach40 3.2Composite Leading Indicators for Financial Crises48 4.A Critique of Early Warning Indicators Used in Practice53 5.Conclusion64 Appendix68 Bibliography69

Financial crises have become relatively frequent events since the beginning of the 1980s. They have taken three main forms: currency crises, banking crises, or both - so called twin crises. As the number of developed economies, developing countries, and economies in transition experienced severe financial crashes researchers are trying to propose a framework for systemic analyses. That is why attempts to advance the understanding of features leading to the outbreak of financial crisis as well as the reasons of vulnerability have become more and more important. In recent years a number of efforts have been undertaken to identify variables that act as early warning signals for crises. The purpose of this paper is to provide some perspective on the issue of early warning signals of vulnerability to currency crises. In particular, it is aimed at presenting and highlighting the main findings of theoretical literature in this area. An effective warning system should consider a broad variety of indicators, as currency crises seem to be usually associated with multiple economic and sometimes political problems. Indicators that have proven to be particularly useful in anticipating crises and received empirical support include the development of international reserves, real exchange rate, domestic credit, credit to the public sector, domestic inflation, and structure and financing of public debt. Other indicators that have found support are trade balance, export performance, money growth, M2/international reserves ratio, foreign interest rates, real GDP growth, and fiscal deficit. Many of the proposed leading indicators have been able to predict particular crises, however, only few have showed ability to do so consistently. Generally, economic models can be said to be more successful in predicting crises that erupt because of weak fundamentals, which make country vulnerable to adverse shocks. They are less likely in anticipating crises due to selffulfilling expectations or pure contagion effects. So far economists are only able to identify situations in which an economy could face the risk of a financial crisis. This is most because of the well-known fact that if we knew the crisis would have already occurred. Warning indicators seem to be unlikely to predict crises in precise way but their analyses can provide extended information about impending problems what enables to take preventive measures.

The abruptness and virulence of the 1997 Asian crises have led many to claim that these crises are of a new breed and were thus unforecastable. This paper examines 102 financial crises in 20 countries and concludes that the Asian crises are not of a new variety. Overall, the 1997 Asian crises, as well as previous crises elsewhere, occur when economies are in distress, making the degree of fragility of the economy a useful indicator of future crises. Based on this idea, the paper proposes different composite leading indicators of crises, evaluated in terms of accuracy both in-sample and out-of-sample.

This paper examines episodes of the banking system distress and crisis in a large sample of countries. The empirical results identify several macroeconomic and financial variables as useful leading indicators. The main macroeconomic indicators were of limited value in predicting the Asian crises; the best warning signs were proxies for the vulnerability of the banking and corporate sector. Full-blown banking crises are shown to be more associated with external developments, and domestic variables are the main leading indicators of severe but contained banking distress.