President Pianalto discusses the characteristics of international reserve currencies and the benefits that a country - or a region such as the Eurozone - can enjoy if its currency fulfills that role. She concludes with comments on why global currency competition provides an incentive for central...

An investigation of whether the G-3 nations (Germany, Japan, and the U.S.) successfully maintained target zones following the G-7's February 1987 Louvre meeting. Using daily, official intervention data and simultaneous-equation techniques, the authors determine that the G-3 reacted in a manner...

An analysis of how central-bank exchange-market intervention can affect both the level of exchange rates and the risk premium in asset returns, showing how the risk premium is related to the conditional variances of intervention and other exogenous processes.

A look at whether the United States' decision to cease intervention after March 1981 had a perceptible influence on the day-to-day behavior of exchange rates, using the stable paretian distribution.

Sterilized intervention is generally ineffective. Countries that conduct monetary policy using an overnight, interbank rate as an intermediate target automatically sterilize their interventions. Nonsterilized interventions can influence nominal exchange rates, but they conflict with price...

This paper utilizes recent research developments in portfolio balance theory and in real exchange-rate instability to synthesize, update, and test the optimum currency area (OCA) theory. Four hypotheses, capturing the central features of the OCA theory, are advanced and tested in a...

A study of how public capital stock impacts regional economic development, which jointly models the effects of local public infrastructure on personal income and the effect of personal income on the allocation of local public outlays.

This paper examines the relationship between bank performance and economic growth at the state level. We develop a regional credit view to explain how, due to information costs, regional banking conditions can influence local economic activity by affecting a region's ability to fund local...