A gravity model is used to assess the separate effects of exchange rate volatility and currency unions on international trade. The panel data set used includes bilateral observations for five years spanning 1970 through 1990 for 186 countries. In this data set, there are over one hundred...

This paper develops a procedure to rank-order countries and commodities using disaggregated US imports data. It finds strong evidence that both countries and commodities can be ranked, consistent with the ‘product cycle’ hypothesis. Countries habitually begin to export goods to the United...

We use a panel of annual data for over one hundred developing countries from 1971–92 to characterize currency crashes. We define a currency crash as a large change of the nominal exchange rate that is also a substantial increase in the rate of change of nominal depreciation. We examine the...

This paper is concerned with the fact that the incidence of speculative attacks tend to be temporally correlated; that is, currency crises appear to pass ‘contagiously’ from one country to another. The paper provides a survey of the theoretical literature, and analyses the contagious nature of...

Previous time-series studies have shown evidence of mean-reversion in real exchange rates. Deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP) appear to have half-lives of approximately four years. The long samples required for statistical significance are unavailable for most currencies, however, and...

A democratic society in which the distribution of wealth is unequal elects political parties which tend to represent the interests of the poor. The clientele of such governments favour unanticipated inflation taxes to erode the real value of debt service and redistribute income from the rich to...

While overall inflation has fallen dramatically in countries like Italy and Spain, inflation in the home good sector remains stubbornly higher than inflation in the traded good sector. If nominal exchange rates are fixed, these real appreciations imply an inflation differential with countries...

We analyse the proposed ‘stability pact’ for countries joining a European Monetary Union (EMU). Within EMU shortsighted governments fail to fully internalize the inflationary consequences of their debt policies, which results in excessive debt accumulation. Hence, although in the absence of...

We explore endogenous monetary unification in the context of a model in which a country with serious structural distortions (and, hence, high inflation) is admitted into a monetary union once its economic structure has converged sufficiently towards that of the existing participants. If...