This paper analyzes institutional arrangements for exchange rate systems and reviews what we know. It looks at the foreign exchange market, different balance of payment situations in which countries find themselves and the necessary exchange rate adjustments. It studies the options that are...

This paper develops a model of the circumstances under which it is beneficial to participate in a currency area. The proposed two-country monetary model of trade with nominal rigidities encompasses the real and monetary arguments suggested by the optimum currency area literature: correlation of...

Previous studies have mainly used reports in the financial press to analyze the link between the interventions of the Bank of Japan (BoJ) and exchange rate volatility. We use official intervention data for the period 1993-2000 that were released only recently by the BoJ and find that the...

Is there a valid argument for international cooperation, and some form of international governance structure, in the international monetary realm? On the purely economic front, the argument is not strong. Yet a broader political economy approach concludes that national currency policy can in...

Development assistance has been criticized for a lack of coordination between aid donors. This paper argues that competition for export markets and political support prevents donor countries from closer coordination of aid activities. To test these hypotheses, we perform logit and fractional...

This paper investigates if the euro's effect on euro-area trade differs across trade sectors and across country pairs, and to what degree heterogeneity matters for estimating the aggregate euro effect. Time-varying latent variables, which are specific to each sector in each country pair, control...

In this paper we analyze disinflation policy when a central bank has imperfect information about private sector inflation expectations but learns about them from economic outcomes, which are in part the result of the disinflation policy. The form of uncertainty is manifested as uncertainty about...

The paper discusses the issue of estimating short- and long-run exchange rate pass-through to import prices in euro area countries and reviews some problems with the measures recently proposed in the literature. Theoretical considerations suggest a long-run Engle and Granger cointegrating...

This paper presents evidence on the accuracy of press reports regarding the foreign exchange market interventions conducted by the Bank of Japan (BoJ) between January 1995 and December 1999. We find that the reports of interventions in the financial press are a relatively inaccurate indicator...

We use the event-study methodology to analyze the effectiveness of the foreign exchange market interventions conducted by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) during the period from 1986 through 1995. We find some evidence that the interventions of the SNB had an impact on exchange rate dynamics. The...