Alexander Swoboda is one of the originators of the bipolar view that capital mobility creates pressure for countries to abandon intermediate exchange rate arrangements in favor of greater flexibility and harder pegs. This paper takes another look at the evidence for this hypothesis using two...

This paper improves upon the recently developed literature on exits from fixed exchange rate regimes in three ways: 1) It allows for two indicators for post-exit macroeconomic conditions, the change in the exchange rate and the change in the output gap; 2) it tests whether the distinction...

This Paper reviews the pros and cons of an early EU enlargement towards Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs hereafter). First, the Maastricht criteria, which cannot be literally assessed during the catching up process, but that nevertheless mirror the huge efforts undertaken in order...

Testing the hypothesis that international equity market correlation increases in volatile times is a difficult exercise and misleading results have often been reported in the past because of a spurious relationship between correlation and volatility. This paper focuses on extreme correlation,...

This paper relates the volatility of the (trade-weighted) effective real exchange rate to the degree of trade openness of an economy. The theoretical part presents an intertemporal monetary model with nominal labour (factor) market rigidities. Both monetary and aggregate supply shocks are shown...

The paper analyzes foreign investment and asset prices in a context of uncertainty over future government policy. The model endogenizes the process of learning by foreign investors facing a potentially opportunistic government, which chooses strategically the timing of a policy reversal in order...

In this Paper we focus on the different historical regime experiences of the core and the periphery. Using conventional Feldstein-Horioka tests, but taking a more careful look at the panel properties of our sample, this Paper reports results which are consistent with the ‘Folk’ wisdom that...

This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of the short-horizon predictive ability of economic fundamentals and forward premia on monthly exchange rate returns in a framework that allows for volatility timing. We implement Bayesian methods for estimation and ranking of a set of empirical...

We analyse the choice of exchange rate regimes of the 25 transition economies in Europe and the CIS after 1990. The empirical results show that the traditional Optimum Currency Area considerations provide relevant guidance for the exchange rate regime choices in these countries. Moreover,...

The impact of exchange rate fluctuations on international trade has long been a major concern for policy-makers. This is particularly the case in Europe, where countries trade extensively with each other. The crisis that began in the Summer of 1992 generated increased exchange rate fluctuations...