The appreciation of the U.S. dollar over the past five years opens important areas of research. The fact of a large and persistent real appreciation poses a challenge for equilibrium theorists to uncover the change in fundamentals and seems to support the role of long-term wage contracts in...

The paper investigates the sources of debt and debt difficulties for a group of Latin American countries. It is argued that external shocks -- oil, interest rates, world recession and the fall in real commodity prices -- cannot account by themselves for the problems. Budget deficits that...

The paper was prepared for the NBER-IMF conference on Exchange Rate Policy and Interdependence. It reviews the experience with flexible exchange rates and the main policy alternatives that have been suggested. The theoretical part develops a modern open economy macro model with an emphasis on...

This report presents two unrelated, short papers on exchange rate rules and on the real value of the external debt. The paper on exchange rate policy uses the Taylor model of overlapping, long term wage contracts to ask whether accommodating or PPP oriented exchange rate policies tend to...

This paper discusses the link between portfolio diversification models of exchange risk and the macroeconomics of exchange rate determination. A first part sets out the mean-variance model of portfolio choice for the case of two nominal assets with random real returns. From there the model is...

This paper discusses exchange rate rules in their role as macroeconomic instruments. Two quite different approaches are pursued. The traditional view is that exchange rate flexibility is a substitute for money wage flexibility so that managed money and managed exchange rates yield the necessary...