Using newly assembled data on foreign exchange market intervention, we construct a daily index of exchange market pressure during the 1992-3 crisis in the European Monetary System. Using this index, we pinpoint when and where the crisis was most severe. Our analysis focuses on a neglected factor...

Motivated by the Chinese experience, we analyze a semi-open economy where the central bank has access to international capital markets, but the private sector has not. This enables the central bank to choose an interest rate different from the international rate. We examine the optimal policy of...

This paper aims at explaining two stylized facts of the Lost Decade in Japan: rising wage inequalities and increasing firm-level productivity differentials. We build a model where firms can choose between efficiency wages with endogenous effort and competitive wages, and show that it can...

In this paper we analyze the implications of a persistent liquidity trap in a monetary model with asset scarcity. We show that a liquidity trap may lead to an increase in real cash holdings and be associated with a decline in output in the medium term. This medium-term impact is a supply-side...

Episodes of large capital inflows in small open economies are often associated with a shift of resources from the tradable to the non-tradable sector and sometimes lead to balance-of-payments crises. This paper builds a two-sector dynamic model to study the evolution of the sectoral structure...