While the global financial crisis was centered in the United States, it led to a surprising appreciation in the dollar, suggesting global dollar illiquidity. In response, the Federal Reserve partnered with other central banks to inject dollars into the international financial system. Empirical...

In this paper we connect the events of the last twelve months, "The Panic of 2008" as it has been called, to the demand for international reserves. In previous work, we have shown that international reserve demand can be rationalized by a central bank's desire to backstop the broad money supply...

This paper studies the transmission of shocks and the trade-offs between stabilizing CPI inflation and alternative measures of the output gap in Ramses, the Riksbank's empirical dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of a small open economy. The main results are, first, that the...

We lay down a standard macroeconomic model of a small open economy with a fixed exchange rate and study optimal capital controls (defined as maximizing the utility of a representative household). We provide sharp analytical and numerical characterizations for a variety of shocks. We find that...

We analyze the policy trade-offs generated by local currency price stability of imports in economies where upstream producers strategically interact with downstream firms selling the final goods to consumers. We study the effects of staggered price setting at the downstream level on the optimal...

Fiat money contains the seeds of its own destruction. It has no intrinsic value and, yet, it can be exchanged for valuable consumption and production goods. As Hahn (1965) shows, this situation puts fiat money's market value or liquidity premium at the brink of collapse. In this paper I will...

A dynamic general equilibrium model of a small open economy is presented where agents may choose the frequency of price changes. A fixed exchange rate is compared to inflation targeting and money targeting. A fixed rate generates more price flexibility than the other regimes when the expenditure...

It has recently become popular to argue that globalization has had or will soon have dramatic consequences for the nature of the monetary transmission mechanism, and it is sometimes suggested that this could threaten the ability of national central banks to control inflation within their...

This paper addresses the issue of the optimal stock of international reserves in terms of a statistical model in which reserves affect both the probability of a Sudden Stop-as well as associated output costs-by reducing the balance-sheet effects of liability dollarization. Optimal reserves are...

The global economy has a chronic shortage of safe assets which lies behind many recent macroeconomic imbalances. This paper provides a simple model of the Safe Asset Mechanism (SAM), its recessionary safety traps, and its policy antidotes. Safety traps share many common features with...