This paper studies the pass-through of exchange rate changes into the prices of imports that originated inside the euro area made by some New Member States (NMSs) of the European Union and one candidate country (Turkey). I use data on import unit values for nine different product categories and...

Sovereign external assets (SEAs) comprise foreign exchange reserves and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). The global stock of reserves reached 7 $trn in the second quarter of 2008, but data on SWF are rather elusive. Our estimation puts the SWFs at around 2,5 $trn dollars by 2007 and in the last...

The ECB has still not decided which monetary policy strategy to pursue from 1999. However, the preparatory work has reduced the possible alternatives to two: a strategy of intermediate objectives fixed in terms of the quantity of money and a direct inflation targeting strategy. It would be also...

This paper has been prepared to mark the tenth anniversary of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). It seeks to give an overview of the Spanish economy’s experience in this new institutional setting. It should be viewed as the result of a joint effort by a sizeable group of researchers from the...

In this article, we explore the demand for the euro for risk management purposes, and the evidence of stock market integration in the euro area. We define a reserve currency as one that investors demand either because it helps them hedge real interest risk and inflation risk, or because it helps...

The paper addresses the issue of the role of exchange rate jumps. The short-run dynamics of the peseta's effective exchange rate vis-a- vis OECD countries over the period 1974:1 - 1995:9 is estimated using a PPP-based error-correction model enlarged with additional terms allowing for the...

Emerging economies with inflation targets (IT) face a dilemma between fulfilling the theoretical conditions of "strict IT", which imply a fully flexible exchange rate, or applying a "flexible IT", which entails a de facto managed floating exchange rate with FX interventions to moderate exchange...

This paper presents a model analyzing the potential for an International Court with powers to declare standstills to mitigate the coordination problem inherent to roll-overs in sovereign debt markets. It is shown that, regardless of the quality of the information handled by such an Institution,...