This paper investigates whether, and if so why, the recent ‘Great Recession' was more severe in unofficially dollarised/euroised economies than in other economies. To that end, the paper builds on a novel dataset on unofficial dollarisation/euroisation to test whether the latter was a...

Foreign exchange reserve accumulation has risen dramatically in recent years. The introduction of the euro, greater liquidity in other major currencies, and the rising current account deficits and external debt of the United States have increased the pressure on central banks to diversify away...

We analytically derive optimal central bank portfolios in a minimum variance framework with two assets and quot;transaction demandsquot; caused by sudden stops in capital inflows. In this model, the transaction demands become less important relative to traditional portfolio objectives as debt to...

This paper presents a new concept - the global roles of currencies. The concept combines the domestic and international (cross-border) use of currencies and therefore captures the overall importance of different currencies in a globalised economy. The measure of a currency's global role is based...

This paper empirically investigates the extent to which the financial linkages of Latin American banks with the exterior are influenced by political risk and deposit dollarisation. We find that the sum of banks’ foreign assets and liabilities is a function of risk-return considerations and...

Foreign exchange reserve accumulation has risen dramatically in recent years. The introduction of the euro, greater liquidity in other major currencies, and the rising current account deficits and external debt of the United States have increased the pressure on central banks to diversify away...

The paper assesses the extent to which the Group of Seven (G7) has been successful in its management of major currencies since the 1970s. Using an event-study approach, the paper finds evidence that the G7 has been overall effective in moving the US dollar, yen and euro in the intended direction...

A striking and unexpected feature of the financial crisis has been the sharp appreciation of the US dollar against virtually all currencies globally. The paper finds that negative US-specific macroeconomic shocks during the crisis have triggered a significant strengthening of the US dollar,...

This paper assesses whether the international monetary system is already tripolar and centred around the US dollar, the euro and the Chinese renminbi (RMB). It focuses on what we call China’s “dominance hypothesis”, i.e. whether the renminbi is already the dominant currency in Asia,...

This paper takes a financial market perspective in examining the relationship between oil prices, the US dollar and asset prices, and it exploits the heteroskedasticity for the identification of causality in a multifactor model. It finds a bidirectional causality between the US dollar and oil...