This book brings together a diverse group of experts on international monetary policy to examine the basic conceptual issues of currency unions and other monetary regimes, including flexible and fixed exchange rates, and assess the available empirical evidence on the performance of these...

One key focus of the on-going debate on the integration of international financial markets have been measures to lengthen the maturity of foreign debt. Short-term debt is typically considered to be volatile and thus a potential trigger of currency crises. In contrast to the vivid policy debate...

This paper investigates the effects of fixed versus flexible exchange rate regimes on location choices of firms and on the degree of specialization of countries. In a two-country two-differentiated-good monetary model, demand, supply, and monetary shocks arise after wages are set and prices are...

This paper develops a two-country model to investigate the circumstances under which it is beneficial to participate in a currency area. It captures both the real and monetary arguments suggested by the optimum currency area literature in a simple monetary model of trade with nominal rigidities....