We make the first attempt in the literature to empirically examine the spillover effects of U.S. monetary policy on trade in other countries. In a large sector-level bilateral trade dataset of 137 countries for the years 1970-2000, we find strong and robust evidence supporting an international...

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...

The optimal escape from a liquidity trap involves generating private-sector expectations of a higher future price level and higher future inflation. This lowers the real interest rate and reduces the recession during the liquidity trap. The problem, emphasized by Krugman, is that central-bank...

The debate on renminbi (RMB) revaluation has not subsided, despite the policy change announced by the Chinese authorities in July 2005. In this chapter, we show that the evidence of RMB undervaluation may not be as strong as it appears. Specifically, depending on the method used, the evidence...

This paper applies a new measure of the effectiveness of sterilized interventions to data for 16 economies. The measure is defined as the difference between ex ante (xaEMP) and ex post exchange market pressure (xpEMP). xaEMP is calculated on the basis of a counterfactual that no intervention...

In this paper, we consider an alternative perspective to China's exchange rate policy. We study a semi-open economy where the private sector has no access to international capital markets but the central bank has full access. Moreover, we assume limited financial development generating a large...

In a target-zone exchange rate system, both fundamentals and exchange rate expectations, reflected in interest rate differentials between the domestic and anchor currency, determine the exchange rate. However, the scope to capture exchange rate expectations is limited when policy rates are close...