Emerging economies with inflation targets (IT) face a dilemma between fulfilling the theoretical conditions of “strict IT”, which imply a fully flexible exchange rate, or applying a “flexible IT”, which entails a de facto managed-floating exchange rate with foreign exchange (forex)...

Using a unique dataset on daily foreign exchange intervention and a new methodological framework of a latent factor model of central bank intervention, this paper addresses the effects of intervention in an emerging market. Events in financial markets from 2002 to 2010 provide a natural...

Over the last decade, the microstructure approach to exchange rates has become very popular. The underlying idea of this approach is that the order flows at different levels of aggregation contain valuable information to explain exchange rate movements. The bulk of empirical literature has...

One of the reasons for governments to employ capital controls is to obtain some degree of monetary independence. In this paper we test whether capital controls can reduce the link between exchange rates fluctuations and cross border interest differentials. Recent capital control proxies are used...

This paper examines the duration of fixed exchange rate regimes and investigates whether there is a certain pattern of time dependence in the survival rate of pegged exchange rate regimes for emerging economies. We query why some fixed regimes last longer and determine the macroeconomic, social...

In case of speculative attacks, the central banks' decisions to intervene or not to intervene seem to play an important role for the economic costs of currency crises. The central bank can either abstain from intervening or start an intervention, which in turn can be successful or unsuccessful....

Most of the currency literature investigates the risk and return characteristics of the currency carry trade after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. In order to gauge the long-term currency carry premium, we extend the sample to 20 currencies over the period 1900 to 2012. We find modest...

We evaluate the impact of the global financial crisis (GFC) and recent structural changes in the patterns of hoarding international reserves (IR). We confirm that the determinants of IR hoarding evolve with developments in the global economy. During the pre-GFC period of 1999–2006, gross...

Central banks' international reserve holdings have increased significantly in the recent past. While traditional models fail to explain this accumulation of reserves, the more recent literature argues that reserves are used as a lifejacket against financial crises. However, research so far has...

Measures of de facto capital account openness for China and India raise the question whether the Chinn-Ito measure of de jure capital account openness is useful and whether the Lane-Milesi-Ferretti measure of de facto openness ranks the two countries correctly. We examine eight dimensions of de...