Before the crisis of 1997-98, the East Asian economies except for Japan but including China pegged their currencies to the U.S. dollar. To avoid further turmoil, the IMF now argues that these currencies should float more freely. However, our econometric estimations show that the dollar's...

Before the crisis of 1997/98, the East Asian economies - except for Japan but including China - pegged their currencies to the US dollar. To avoid further turmoil, the IMF argues that these currencies should float more freely. However, the authors' econometric estimations show that the dollar's...

The pressure on the Chinese government to appreciate the Chinese yuan is large. Since the start of the dollar's sustained depreciation in early 2002 the western industrialized countries including Japan argue that China's fixed peg is equivalent to a mercantilist trade policy. From the Chinese...

Before the 1997-1998 crisis, the East Asian economies - except for Japan - informally pegged their currencies to the dollar. These soft pegs made them vulnerable to a depreciating yen, thereby aggravating the crisis. To limit future misalignments, the IMF wants East Asian currencies to float...

This paper studies the role of the yen/dollar exchange rate in the Bank of Japan’s monetary policy reaction function. In contrast to prior estimations of reaction functions based on the Taylor-rule, we allow for regime shifts by estimating rolling coefficients from January 1974 to March 1999....

This paper studies the role of the yen/dollar exchange rate in the Bank of Japan's monetary policy reaction function. In contrast to prior estimations of reaction functions based on the Taylor-rule, we allow for regime shifts by estimating rolling coefficients from January 1974 to March 1999....

This paper explores the link between monetary policies of large industrial countries and international credit cycles. Based on an overinvestment framework, we show that in the prevailing asymmetric world monetary system, monetary policies of large centre countries can fuel credit booms in...

Credit booms have globally fuelled hikes in stock, raw material and real estate markets which have culminated in the recent US subprime market crisis. We explain the global asset market booms since the mid 1980s based on the overinvestment theories of Hayek, Wicksell and Schumpeter. We argue...

We test for the impact of exchange rate volatility on growth in emerging market economies based on the theory of optimum currency areas. Our findings provide evidence for a positive impact of exchange rate stability on growth. -- OCA ; growth

The paper investigates the impact of exchange rate volatility on growth in Emerging Europe and East Asia. Exchange stability has been argued to affect growth negatively as it deprives countries from the ability to react in a flexible way to asymmetric real shocks and may enhance the probability...