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...

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...

A gravity model is used to assess the separate effects of exchange rate volatility and currency unions on international trade. The panel data set used includes bilateral observations for five years spanning 1970 through 1990 for 186 countries. In this data set, there are over one hundred...

Both the literature and new empirical evidence show that exchange rate regimes differ primarily by the noisiness of the exchange rate, not by measurable macroeconomic fundamentals. This motivates a theoretical analysis of exchange rate regimes with noise traders. The presence of noise traders...

Fixed exchange rates are less volatile than floating rates. The volatility of macroeconomic variables, such as money and output, does not change very much across exchange rate regimes, however. This suggests that exchange rate models based only on macroeconomic fundamentals are unlikely to be...

Previous time-series studies have shown evidence of mean-reversion in real exchange rates. Deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP) appear to have half-lives of approximately four years. The long samples required for statistical significance are unavailable for most currencies, however, and...

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...

A democratic society in which the distribution of wealth is unequal elects political parties which tend to represent the interests of the poor. The clientele of such governments favour unanticipated inflation taxes to erode the real value of debt service and redistribute income from the rich to...

We analyse the proposed ‘stability pact’ for countries joining a European Monetary Union (EMU). Within EMU shortsighted governments fail to fully internalize the inflationary consequences of their debt policies, which results in excessive debt accumulation. Hence, although in the absence of...

We explore endogenous monetary unification in the context of a model in which a country with serious structural distortions (and, hence, high inflation) is admitted into a monetary union once its economic structure has converged sufficiently towards that of the existing participants. If...