Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to examine empirical characteristics of two commonly mentioned expressions of international financial crisis, "sudden stops" and currency crises. Design/methodology/approach -Sudden stop and currency crisis events are identified and empirical regularities among them are analyzed based on the annual data of 25 emerging market countries from 1990 to 2003. Findings -Puzzlingly, these two seemingly close expressions of crises overlap less than 50 percent of the time and sudden stops more frequently precede than follow currency crises. Also the two different sudden stop measures are not strongly correlated with each other. Research limitations/implications -This shows that it can make a great deal of difference what measure is used and suggests that studies in this area should be sure to check the robustness of their results to different measures. Practical implications -The authors think that the proper analysis should focus on how to use these different measures to understand the nature of the crises. Thus, sudden stop and currency crisis measures should be used as complements, rather than substitutes. Social implications -The alarming frequency of the emerging market crises during the last three decades has motivated a large volume of theoretical and empirical literature on the subject. The paper's results advance understanding of these events. Originality/value -A large body of studies on currency crises coexists with a growing literature on sudden stops yet a majority of the studies that investigate either one of these phenomena do not mention the other. The paper adds value by investigating empirical relationships between them.

This study uses new measures of distance education to assess the impact on retention rates at 4-year public and private non-profit universities in the U.S. We present evidence that the percent of undergraduates enrolled exclusively in distance education courses reduces a university’s freshmen retention rate, particularly for institutions with a relatively low median SAT score.  We find no clear evidence of lower retention rates when undergraduates are enrolled in a combination of on-campus and distance education courses.  These findings suggest increased enrollment through distance education can come at the expense of lower retention.

Recent empirical literature on sudden stops and banking crises suggests the interaction of these crises is particularly harmful to the real economy. Despite this, very little empirical research has been undertaken to decipher the interplay between these crises. This paper contributes to this literature by applying a panel vector autoregression to examine how these crises interact via domestic credit, capital flows, and output growth. This research finds evidence supporting the view that sudden stops occurring with banking crises are more harmful than sudden stops occurring by themselves. It also finds that during the joint occurrences of these crises domestic credit increases during the onset of a sudden stop, but this expansion in credit results in an adverse impact on output growth. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that the financial intermediaries are unable to allocate credit efficiently hence why the interaction of sudden stops and banking crises is above and beyond their individual effects.