History provides us with many examples of multiple country fixed exchange rate regimes that have eventually fallen apart. In light of these failures, why has the EMS been so successful in stabilizing exchange rates among members, and in expanding its membership? This paper argues that one key...

The paper presents a model of a monetary union designed to illuminate monetary and exchange rate policy in the West African Monetary Union (UMOA). Emphasis is placed on the interaction of the members of UMOA with each other, through the common central bank, and on their interaction with France...

This paper analyzes strategic monetary policies using a standard two country stochastic macro model. Three noncooperative equilibria, namely Cournot, Stackelberg, and Consistent Conjectural Variations, are considered.The Pareto Optimal equilibrium, where aggregate joint costs are minimizedis...

The most important conclusion of this paper is that the growth rate of the money supply influences the U.S. inflation rate more strongly and promptly than in most previous studies, because the flexible exchange rate system has introduced an additional channel of monetary impact, over and above...

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical investigation into timing relationships between variables within and across industrialized countries. In the analysis we highlight the two polar cases of completely closed and open economies and draw some implications for timing between monetary...

We demonstrate how capital account and trade account liberalizations help reduce inefficiencies associated with the fluctuations in the output gap, relative to the inefficiencies associated with the fluctuations in inflation. With capital account liberalization the representative household is...

This paper points out and tests a straight forward but previously unnoticed prediction of models in which the absence of precommitment in monetary policy leads to excessive inflation. Because unanticipated monetary expansion leads to real exchange rate depreciation, and because the harms of real...

We document that observed international input-output linkages contribute substantially to synchronizing producer price inflation (PPI) across countries. Using a multi-country, industry-level dataset that combines information on PPI and exchange rates with international and domestic input-output...

In a previous analysis of the West African Monetary Union, Macedo(1985a), size is taken to be a major structural characteristic of a country in the sense that large countries are not affected by disturbances originating in small countries but small countries are affected by large countries'...