This essay considers some prescriptions that are currently popular regarding exchange rate regimes: a general movement toward floating, a general movement toward fixing, or a general movement toward either extreme and away from the middle. The whole spectrum from fixed to floating is covered...

This paper, written for the NBER Conference on the Changing Role of the United States in the World Economy, covers the capital account in the U.S. balance of payments. It first traces the history from 1946 to 1980, a period throughout which Americans were steadily building up a positive net...

A new technique for estimating countries' de facto exchange rate regimes synthesizes two approaches. One approach estimates the implicit de facto basket weights in an OLS regression of the local currency value rate against major currency values. Here the hypothesis is a basket peg with little...

The paper offers a new approach to estimate de facto exchange rate regimes, a synthesis of two techniques. One is a technique that the authors have used in the past to estimate implicit de facto weights when the hypothesis is a basket peg with little flexibility. The second is a technique used...

This paper uses history to explore the empirical content of two determinants of tariff policy that have a long pedigree: the Stolper-Samuelson corollary to the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem, and the infant-industry argument for protection. It reports a set of world tariff facts for the 150 years...

What is the effect of trade on a country's environment, for a given level of GDP? Some have observed an apparent positive correlation between openness to trade and measures of environmental quality. But this could be due to endogeneity of trade, rather than causality. This paper uses exogenous...

Using a large sample of developing and industrialized economies during 1970-1999, this paper explores whether the choice of exchange rate regime affects the sensitivity of local interest rates to international interest rates. In most cases, we cannot reject full transmission of international...

Different approaches to quantifying the degree of capital mobility for a cross-section of currencies -- particularly saving-investment correlations and tests of real interest parity - have appeared to show a surprisingly low degree of financial market integration. We use a new data set, forward...

This paper develops a new econometric framework to estimate and classify exchange rate regimes. They are classified into four distinct categories: fixed exchange rates, BBC (band, basket and crawl), managed floating, and freely floating. The procedure captures the patterns of exchange rate...