On the twentieth anniversary of its inception, the euro has yet to expand its role as an international currency. We document this fact with a wide range of indicators including its role as an anchor or reference in exchange rate arrangements--which we argue is a portmanteau measure--and as a...

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...

The last decade has seen an outpouring of scholarship on the economics of the Great Depression. If there is anything approaching a consensus, it is a synthetic view which admits a role both for monetary policy mistakes and for the international monetary and financial system in transmitting those...

We highlight the elements of the operation of the U.S. Exchange Stabilization Fund that Harry Dexter White, who directed the Treasury's division of monetary research, transferred to his plan for the operation of the International Monetary Fund. The elements included the principle that all...

In recent years, many countries have instituted monetary reforms aimed at improving anti-inflation credibility. Is it a problem, however, that international welfare spillover effects seldom receive much consideration in the design of monetary reforms? Surprisingly, the answer may be no. Under...

In this paper we analyze the changing role of gold in the international monetary system, in particular the persistence of gold holdings by monetary authorities for 20 years following the breakdown of the Brettone Woods system system and the Second Amendment to the Articles of Agreement of the...

In this paper we speculate about the evolution of the international monetary system in the last 2/3 of the 20th century absent the Great Depression but present the major post-Depression political and economic upheavals: WWII and II and the Cold War. We argue that without the Depression the...

This paper provides answers to two questions. The first question is which international monetary regime is best for economic performance? One based on fixed exchange rates: including the gold standard and its variants? Adjustable peg regimes such as the Bretton Woods system and the European...

In recent years, the theory of rules and discretion in monetary policy has fascinated scores of academic economists and policymakers alike. This paper asks whether it can be applied to understand the history of the world monetary system, by focusing on the setup and the experience of the Bretton...

This paper provides a framework for evaluating how market participants' beliefs about foreign exchange target zones change as they learn about central bank intervention policy. In order to examine this behavior, we first generalize the standard target zone model to allow for intra-marginal...