The carry trade is the investment strategy of going long in high-yield target currencies and short in low-yield funding currencies. Recently, this naive trade has seen very high returns for long periods, followed by large crash losses after large depreciations of the target currencies. Based on...

We provide an overview of the important events of the recent global financial crisis and their implications for exchange rates and market dynamics. Our goal is to catalogue all that was truly of major importance in this episode. We also construct a quantitative measure of crises that allows for...

We study the effects of sterilized intervention operations executed on behalf of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) using tick-by-tick transaction data between 1985-95.We extend preliminary analysis conducted by Fischer and Zurlinden (1999) by matching these data with intra-day indicative exchange...

The empirical performance of macroeconomic exchange rate models is more than disappointing. This dismal result is also reflected in the forecasting capabilities of professional analysts: all in all, analysts are not in a position to beat naïve random walk forecasts. The root for this deficient...

The study analyses the characteristics of professional exchange rate forecasts for the €/US$ rate. The results indicate that the quality of forecasts produced by professional economists is rather poor and incompatible with the rational expectations hypothesis. This dismal result is according...

A common feature for developing countries that have experienced a sharp drop in inflation without large output losses is the extensive use of capital controls. This study shows that capital controls significantly improve the sacrifice ratio. This element contributes to the explanation of small...

How do national minimum wages affect global economic growth? We address this question in a two-country endogenous growth model with capital mobility that emphasizes a link between wages, savings and growth. We identify the conditions on technology and national preferences that determine whether...

We review the theoretical links between growth and agglomeration. Growth, in the form of innovation, can be at the origin of catastrophic spatial agglomeration in a cumulative process à la Myrdal. One of the surprising features of the Krugman (1991) model, was that the introduction of partial...

This paper suggests a simple modification of the core-periphery model by Krugman (1991), which makes the model easy to solve analytically. We use the modified model to analyse the tendencies for geographical agglomeration of manufacturing industry as regions integrate economically. Two cases of...

We consider the role of capital mobility and international taxation in explaining the observed diversity in long-term income growth rates. Under perfect capital mobility, international differences in taxes will not matter for total growth differentials. Policy differences have a role to play in...