Structural Vulnerabilities and Currency Crises

This paper examines the role of structural factors - governance and rule of law, corporate sector governance (creditor rights and shareholder rights), corporate financing structure - as well as macroeconomic variables in currency crises. Using a technique known as a binary recursive tree allows for interactions between the various explanatory variables. It is found that structural vulnerabilities play an important role in the occurrence of "deep" currency crises (those with a real GDP growth decline of at least 3 percentage points) and that there are complex interactions between these structural vulnerabilities and macroeconomic imbalances. Copyright 2003, International Monetary Fund

East Asia in the aftermath: Was there a crunch?

This paper investigates whether there was a credit crunch in East Asia during the recent financial and economic crises. Motivated by widespread concern that, over and above any increases in real interest rates, corporates may have also faced credit rationing, we adopt an explicit disequilibrium framework for analyzing the behavior of real credit with a view to assessing whether the supply of, or demand for credit has been a binding constraint. The findings highlight the dynamics associated with a credit crunch. We find evidence of a »credit crunch« in all three crisis countries (Indonesia, Korea, Thailand) in the period immediately following the crisis as the banking system distress deepened, and the supply of (real) credit declined. Thereafter, however, credit demand also fell sharply as economic recession took hold and corporate bankruptcies increased. By the end of the first quarter of 1998, therefore, the constraining factor was the demand for credit. We conclude that, beyond the initial crisis period, there is little evidence of a credit crunch at the aggregate level, although high real interest rates - and credit rationing of individual firms - may have continued to contribute to the difficulties of the corporate sector. --emerging markets,credit crisis

Quantum Hall Solitons with Intertwined Spin and Pseudospin at $\nu = \ 1$

In this paper we study in detail different types of topological solitons which are possible in bilayer quantum Hall systems at filling fraction $\nu =1$ when spin degrees of freedom are included. Starting from a microscopic Hamiltonian we derive an effective energy functional for studying such excitations. The gauge invariance and $CP^{3}$ character of this energy fuctional and their consequences are examined. Then we identify permissible classes of finite energy solutions which are topologically non-trivial. We also numerically evaulate a representative solution in which a pseudospin (layer degrees of freedom) bimeron in a given spin component is intertwined with spin-skyrmions in each layer, and and discuss whether it is energetically favoured as the lowest lying excitation in such system with some numerical results.Comment: Revised version with more numerical results one more figure and table added. Total 32 pages,6 Postscript figures. Correspondence to [email protected]

Dynamics of decoherence without dissipation in a squeezed thermal bath

We study a generic open quantum system where the coupling between the system and its environment is of an energy-preserving quantum nondemolition (QND) type. We obtain the general master equation for the evolution of such a system under the influence of a squeezed thermal bath of harmonic oscillators. From the master equation it can be seen explicitly that the process involves decoherence or dephasing without any dissipation of energy. We work out the decoherence-causing term in the high and zero temperature limits and check that they match with known results for the case of a thermal bath. The decay of the coherence is quantified as well by the dynamics of the linear entropy of the system under various environmental conditions. We make a comparison of the quantum statistical properties between QND and dissipative types of evolution using a system of two-level atom and a harmonic oscillator.Comment: Accepted for publication in J. Phys. A: Math. Theor.; 23 pages, 8 figure