An optimum currency area is an economic unit composed of regions affected symmetrically by disturbances and between which labour and other factors of production flow freely. The symmetrical nature of disturbances and the high degree of factor mobility make it optimal to forsake nominal exchange...

Originally propounded by the 16th-century scholars of the University of Salamanca, the concept of purchasing power parity (PPP) was revived in the interwar period in the context of the debate concerning the appropriate level at which to re-establish international exchange rate parities. Broadly...

Border prices of traded goods are highly sensitive to exchange rates, but the CPI, and the retail prices of these goods, are more stable. Our paper decomposes the sources of this stability for twenty-one OECD countries, focusing on the important roles of distribution margins and imported inputs...

Recent research in financial economics has concentrated on the role of non-economic, or non-fundamentalist, speculators in asset markets. This paper presents some empirical evidence concerning the nature and perceived importance of a major form of non-fundamentalist analysis, chartism, in the...

The foreign exchange risk premium in an exchange rate target-zone regime with devaluation/realignment risks is derived. In contrast to previous literature, the exchange rate's heteroscedasticity within the band, as well as a separate devaluation/realignment risk, is taken into account. The risk...

The assertion that a flexible exchange rate regime would facilitate current account adjustment is often repeated in policy circles. In this paper, we compile a data set encompassing data for over 170 countries over the 1971-2005 period, and examine whether the rate of current account reversion...

We assess the progress made by the profession in understanding real exchange rate behaviour, through a selective and critical but nonetheless expository review of the literature. Our reading of the literature leads us to the main conclusions that purchasing power parity might be viewed as a...

The distributional effects of the minimum wage are analysed in a model where skilled and unskilled labour enter the production function. It is argued that distributional goals are best achieved by letting the labour market clear and achieving redistribution through taxes and transfers.

We lay out a small open economy version of the Calvo sticky price model, and show how the equilibrium dynamics can be reduced to a tractable canonical system in domestic inflation and the output gap. We employ this framework to analyse the macroeconomic implications of three alternative monetary...

We formulate a market microstructure model of exchange determination we employ to investigate the impact of foreign exchange intervention on exchange rates and on foreign exchange (FX) market conditions. With our formulation we show i) how foreign exchange intervention in°uences exchange rates...