This paper reviews the problems that must be resolved at the Intergovernmental Conference in 1996 to clear the way for European Monetary Union: locking in Germany's commitment to the project, and reconciling EMU with variable geometry. It reviews what we know about the costs and benefits of EMU...

The size and economic relevance of Europe may imply a new role for the EURO in the international financial markets. But will the EURO compete with the $US and the Yen for a place in the basket of international currencies? Will that induce a bipolar or indeed tri-polar system, and with what...

*The European Union will enter Stage Three of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999. The development of euro financial markets and thickness externalities in the use of the euro as means of payment will be the major factors determining the importance of the euro as an international currency....

Three of the most important recent facts in global macroeconomics - the sustained rise in the US current account deficit, the stubborn decline in long run real rates, and the rise in the share of US assets in global portfolio - appear as anomalies from the perspective of conventional wisdom and...

The Balassa-Samuelson model, which explains real exchange rate movements in terms of sectoral productivities, rests on two components. First, the model implies that the relative price of non-traded goods in each country should reflect the relative productivity of labour in the traded and...

Since the 1995 publication of Obsteld and Rogoff's Redux model, there has been an outpouring of research on open-economy dynamic general equilibrium models that incorporate imperfect competition and nominal rigidities. This paper offers an interim survey of this recent literature.

This paper investigates theoretically and empirically the effect on exchange rates of integrating monetary policy in Europe. It shows that the likely effect will be to generate a tighter European monetary policy (notwithstanding credibility aspects which are not discussed). The argument is that...

This paper analyses whether sovereign default episodes can be seen as contingencies of optimal international lending contracts. The model considers a small open economy with capital accumulation and without commitment to repay debt. Taking first order approximations of Bellman equations, I...

This paper investigates the role of three likely factors in driving the steady deterioration of the US external balance: US technology developments, changes in the US government fiscal position and the Fed’s monetary policy. Estimating several Vector Autoregressions on US data over the period...

This paper investigates the theoretical properties of a class of 'second generation' models of currency crises as well as their applicability to empirical work. We show that under some conditions these models give rise to an arbitrarily large number of equilibria, as well as cyclic or chaotic...