In recent years, a number of central banks have chosen to orient their monetary policy toward the achievement of numerical inflation targets. This study examines the experience of the first three countries to adopt an inflation-targeting strategy--New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom. It...

Over the past decade, the level of required balances held by depository institutions in the United States has declined dramatically. The decline in reserve balances has fueled a debate over the role of reserve requirements. On the one hand, proponents of reserve requirements argue that low...

Chronic inflation and the importance of the exchange rate as a nominal anchor for the domestic price level have led some Latin American countries to consider returning to a fixed dollar exchange rate. John Welch and Darryl McLeod examine the costs and benefits of real exchange rate movements and...

Japanese official intervention in the foreign exchange market is of by far the largest magnitude in the world, despite little or no evidence that it is effective in moving exchange rates. Up until recently, however, official data on intervention has not been available for Japan. This paper...

An analysis of how central-bank exchange-market intervention can affect both the level of exchange rates and the risk premium in asset returns, showing how the risk premium is related to the conditional variances of intervention and other exogenous processes.