This paper revises pre-World War II current account data for thirteen countries by treating gold flows on a consistent basis. The standard historical data sources often fail to distinguish between monetary gold exports, which are capital-account credits, and nonmonetary gold exports, which are...

What idiosyncratic consumption risks can countries trade away on international asset markets? This paper develops an empirical methodology for answering the question. The tests are based on the proposition that in an integrated world asset market with representative national agents, the ex post...

Fifty years ago, Harry G. Johnson published “The Case for Flexible Exchange Rates, 1969,” its title echoing Milton Friedman’s classic essay of the early 1950s. Though somewhat forgotten today, Johnson’s reprise was an important element in the late 1960s debate over the future of the...

The recent balance-of-payments literature shows that-speculative attacks on a pegged exchange rate must sometimes-occur if the path of the rate is riot to offer abnormal profit opportunities. Such attacks are fully rational, as they reflect the market's response to a regime breakdown that is...

This note tests the hypothesis that nominal interest differentials between similar assets denominated in different currencies can be explained entirely by the expected change in the exchange rate over the holding period. This proposition, often called the "Fisher open" hypothesis or the...

This paper investigates the long- and short-run neutrality of open-market monetary policy in a world of fixed exchange rates and imperfect substitutability between bonds denominated in different currencies. Using an illustrative portfolio-balance model, it shows that when the public discounts...

This paper is a highly selective review of our knowledge about the scope for sterilized intervention in foreign exchange markets under alternative exchange-rate regimes. Section I demonstrates the potential importance of simultaneous-equations bias in single-equation econometric studies of the...