The Paper considers alternative exchange rate regimes for the 10 East European accession candidates, both prior to EU accession and during the period following EU accession but prior to EMU membership. We conclude that from an economic point of view, EMU membership should be as early as...

We propose that analysis of purchasing power parity (PPP) and the law of one price (LOOP) should explicitly take into account the possibility of ‘commodity points’ – thresholds delineating a region of no central tendency among relative prices, possibly due to lack of perfect arbitrage in...

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...

We fit nonlinearly mean-reverting models to real dollar exchange rates over the post-Bretton Woods period, consistent with a theoretical literature on transaction costs in international arbitrage. The half lives of real exchange rate shocks, calculated through Monte Carlo integration, imply...

In this Paper we assess the progress made by the profession in understanding whether and how exchange rate intervention works. To this end, we review the theory and evidence on official intervention, concentrating primarily on work published within the last decade or so. Our reading of the...

The half-life of deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP) plays a central role in the ongoing debate about the ability of macroeconomic models to account for the time series behaviour of the real exchange rate. The main contribution of this paper is a general framework in which alternative...

As the European Community (EC) unifies its financial markets and fixes its exchange rates, the EFTA countries are liberalizing capital movements to the same extent. The EFTA countries thus face a decision on financial markets and exchange rate policy: should they essentially join the European...

Standard macro models cannot explain why real exchange rates are volatile and disconnected from macro aggregates. Recent research argues that models with persistent growth rate shocks and recursive preferences can solve that puzzle. I show that this result is highly sensitive to the structure of...

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...