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 contrast to earlier recessions, the monetary regimes of many small economies have not changed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. This is due in part to the fact that many small economies continue to use hard exchange rate fixes, a reasonably durable regime. However, most of the...

This Paper tests for uncovered interest parity (UIP) using daily data for twenty-three developing and developed countries through the crisis-strewn 1990s. We find that UIP works better on average in the 1990s than in previous eras in the sense that the slope coefficient from a regression of...

This paper surveys the evidence on the effectiveness of monetary transmission in developing countries. We summarize the arguments for expecting the bank lending channel to be the dominant means of monetary transmission in such countries, and present a simple model that suggests why this channel...

The paper explores the case for monetary and fiscal unification. Monetary policy suffers from an inflation bias because the monetary authorities are not able to commit. With international risk-sharing in a fiscal union, fiscal discipline suffers from moral hazard. An inflation target alleviates...

This paper reviews the monetary transmission mechanism in low income countries (LICs). We use monetary transmission in advanced and emerging markets as a benchmark to identify aspects of the transmission mechanism that may operate differently in LICs. In particular, we focus on the effects of...

Within a standard model of monetary delegation we show that the optimal linear inflation contract performs strictly better than the optimal inflation target when there is uncertainty about the central banker’s preferences. The optimal combination of a contract and a target performs best, and...

This paper explores the interaction between centralized monetary policy and decentralized fiscal policy in a monetary union. Discretionary monetary policy suffers from a failure to commit. Moreover, decentralized fiscal policymakers impose externalities on each other through the influence of...