This paper examines the issue of whether countries can improve their welfare by coordinating macroeconomic policies. The main purpose is to compute the gains from international monetary cooperation as the difference between the steady state consumption levels associated with the Nash and the...

This paper considers the extent to which the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) meets the criteria for a common currency area. NAFTA is compared with the EC, a regional grouping for which initial plans for a monetary union are already in place. Most of the anticipated benefits from a...

Why did monetary authorities hold large gold reserves under Bretton Woods (1944-1971) when only the US had to? We argue that gold holdings were driven by institutional memory and persistent habits of central bankers. Countries continued to back currency in circulation with gold reserves,...

A model reflecting the monetary approach to the balance of payments was developed in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1950s. Its purpose was to integrate monetary, income, and balance of payments analysis, and it became the basis of the conditionality applied to IMF credits....

The North Atlantic financial crisis of 2008-2009 has spurred renewed interest in reforming the international monetary system, which has been malfunctioning in many aspects. Large and volatile capital flows have promoted greater volatility in financial markets, leading to recurrent financial...

Money demand often surges after successful macroeconomic stabilization. This paper gives a name—financial infusion—to these surges because their size, unpredictability, and concurrence with other “success shocks” pose unique challenges to policy, especially under a money rule. An...

The paper tests a hypothesis suggested by Taylor (2000) that a low inflationary environment leads to a low exchange rate pass-through to domestic prices. To test this hypothesis, the paper derives a pass-through relation based on new open economy macroeconomic models. A large database that...

In most macroeconomic models, the substitutability between domestic and foreign goods is calibrated using aggregated data. This imposes homogeneous elasticities across goods, and the calibration is only valid under this assumption. If elasticities are heterogeneous, the aggregate...