Bank Lending and Contagion: Evidence from the Asian Crisis

This paper analyzes how the crisis in Asia spread during the second half of 1997. We cast our net wide and investigate several possible trade and financial linkages among the Asian economies. We construct a series of “contagion vulnerability indices,” which capture the various manifestations of exposure through trade and finance to the initial crisis country and contrast the predictions of this index to actual outcomes during the Asian crisis. We pay attention to the reversal in bank lending of Japanese and European banks, which were lending heavily to emerging Asia on the eve of the crisis. Daily interest rate and exchange rate data for Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand are used to assess whether the patterns of causality and interdependence changed as the crisis spread, as well as to answer question of whether interdependence among the Asian economies has changed as the result of the crisis.