The real exchange rate is said to be the single most important price in an economy. While we used to think that we knew what explained its movements (e.g., the Balassa-Samuelson effect), the recent much-cited result by Engel (1999) proposes a serious reinterpretation i.e., nearly 100% of the...

This paper examines the issue of whether the money supply can serve as a nominal anchor for the domestic price level under real exchange rate targeting. When capital controls are perfect so that there is complete separation between official and unofficial markets for foreign exchange, the...

This paper shows that the response of inflation to external shocks is very different when the authorities target the real exchange rate than when they follow a fixed exchange rate or a preannounced crawling peg. Specifically, shocks that would have no effect on the steady-state inflation rate...