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The IMF was established in 1944 in part to \"give confidence\" to member countries by providing short-term credits. Although the intention was that the availability of the Fund's resources should prevent countries from experiencing financial crises, in practice the institution often has found itself helping its members cope with crises after they occur. This paper examines how the role of the IMF as crisis manager has evolved over time, from its earliest loans to the exchange crisis that hit Mexico in December 1994. It argues that the defining moment for this role was the international debt crisis of 1982.

This paper examines the relationship between financial regulation and the current account in an intertemporal model of the current account where financial regulation affects the current account through liquidity constraints. Greater liquidity constraints decrease the size and persistence of the current account response to a net output shock. The theory is tested with an interacted panel VAR model where the coefficients are allowed to vary with the degree of financial regulation. The current account reaction to an output shock is 60% larger and substantially more persistent in a country with low financial regulation than in one with high financial regulation.

We study the behavior of the U.S. labor share over the past 90 years. We find that the observed decline of the labor share is entirely explained by the capitalization of intellectual property products in the national income and product accounts.

This paper provides an explanation for why garbage implies a much lower relative risk aversion in the consumption-based asset pricing model than National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) consumption expenditure: Unlike garbage, NIPA consumption is filtered to mitigate measurement error. I apply a simple model of the filtering process that allows one to undo the filtering inherent in NIPA consumption. \"Unfiltered NIPA consumption\" well explains the equity premium and is priced in the cross-section of stock returns. I discuss the likely properties of true consumption (i.e., without measurement error and filtering) and quantify implications for habit and long-run risk models.

We undertake a quantitative analysis of the dispersion of current accounts in an open economy version of incomplete insurance model, incorporating important market frictions in trade and financial flows. Calibrated with conventional parameter values, the stochastic stationary equilibrium of the model with limited borrowing can account for about two-thirds of the global dispersion of current accounts. The easing of financial frictions can explain nearly all changes in the current account dispersion in the past four decades whereas the easing of trade frictions has almost no impact on the current account dispersion.

This paper examines the optimality of international capital flows to a persistent net importer of capital, Australia, during its post-capital-controls period 1984-98. The results suggest that international capital flows were larger than optimal during the 1980s, but in the 1990s such flows have been broadly consistent with those predicted by the consumption-smoothing approach to the determination of the current account. The paper also discusses the main implications arising from measures of optimal capital flows, and compares them with the implications arising from the key concepts used in the determination of national creditworthiness.

We provide new firm-level evidence on the effects of capital account liberalization. Based on corporate foreign-currency credit ratings data and a novel capital account restrictions index, we find that capital controls can substantially limit access to, and raise the cost of, foreign currency debt, especially for firms without foreign currency revenues. As an identification strategy, we exploit, via a difference-in-difference approach, within-country variation in firms' access to foreign currency, measured by whether or not a firm belongs to the nontradables sector. Nontradables firms benefit substantially more from capital account liberalization than others, a finding that is robust to a broad range of alternative specifications.

Electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) is nowadays one of the cornerstones of biomolecular mass spectrometry and proteomics. Advances in sample preparation and mass analyzers have enabled researchers to extract much more information from biological samples than just the molecular weight. In particular, relevant for structural biology, noncovalent protein–protein and protein–ligand complexes can now also be analyzed by MS. For these types of analyses, assemblies need to be retained in their native quaternary state in the gas phase. This initial small niche of biomolecular mass spectrometry, nowadays often referred to as “native MS,” has come to maturation over the last two decades, with dozens of laboratories using it to study mostly protein assemblies, but also DNA and RNA-protein assemblies, with the goal to define structure–function relationships. In this perspective, we describe the origins of and (re)define the term native MS, portraying in detail what we meant by “native MS,” when the term was coined and also describing what it does (according to us) not entail. Additionally, we describe a few examples highlighting what native MS is, showing its successes to date while illustrating the wide scope this technology has in solving complex biological questions. Graphical Abstract ᅟ