In this paper I focus on two specific hazard areas in the transition from Stage Two to Stage Three of European economic and monetary union (EMU), as well as on some key problems of Stage Three that EMU's monetary and fiscal structures appear ill-prepared to handle. The transitional hazards are...

Prevalent thinking about liquidity traps suggests that the perfect substitutability of money and bonds at a zero short-term nominal interest rate renders open-market operations ineffective for achieving macroeconomic stabilization goals. In an earlier paper, we showed that this reasoning does...

This paper shows that the optimal extraction of seigniorage implies a strong tendency for inflation to fall over time toward its socially optimal level. The point is made using a multi-period model in which (i) the government can finance deficits through bond issue or money creation, (ii)...

When the goals of internal and external macroeconomic equilibrium are in conflict, sterilized intervention in the foreign exchange market may provide an independent policy instrument through which the central bank can resolve its dilemma in the short run. This paper is concerned with the West...

This paper is a highly selective review of our knowledge about the scope for sterilized intervention in foreign exchange markets under alternative exchange-rate regimes. Section I demonstrates the potential importance of simultaneous-equations bias in single-equation econometric studies of the...