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...

Rational expectations are often used as an argument against policy activism, as they may undermine or neutralize the policymaker’s actions. Although this sometimes happens, rational expectations do not always imply policy invariance or ineffectiveness. In fact, in certain circumstances...

This paper suggests that inflation may be affected differently by grand corruption compared to its positive nexus with petty corruption. In an extended Barro and Gordon (1983a) model grand corruption may serve as a quasi-commitment device: a cheating (expropriating) government may actually deter...

This paper studies the implications of cross-country housing-market heterogeneity in a monetary union for both shock transmission and welfare. I develop a two-country new Keynesian general equilibrium model with housing and collateral constraints to explore this issue. The conventional wisdom is...

A DSGE model is used to examine whether including the exchange rate in the central bank’s policy rule can improve economic performance. Smoothing the exchange rate helps both financially-robust economies and financially-vulnerable emerging economies in handling risk premium shocks and, given a...

We develop a two-country two-period model able to reproduce the key qualitative aspects of the US-China co-dependency (and imbalances) as the result of the Chinese and American authorities pursuing different but complementary objectives. We show that a mercantilist reserve hoarding has served...

This paper studies the effects of the European monetary unification on the volatility of the extensive margin of trade. First, we highlight empirical novel facts about the effects of monetary unification. We build country-level measures of the extensive margin of intra-EMU exports and describe...

In this paper, I examine the international welfare effects of monetary policy. I develop a New Keynesian two-country model, where central banks in both countries follow the Taylor rule. I show that a decrease in the domestic interest rate, under producer currency pricing, is a beggar-thyself...

We study optimal monetary policy for a small open economy in a model where both domestic prices and wages are sticky due to staggered contracts. The simultaneous presence of the two forms of nominal rigidities introduces an additional trade-off between domestic inflation and the output gap. We...

Though the hypothesis that exchange rate regimes fully predetermine monetary policy in the face of external shocks hardly finds any advocates in the field of theory, it has crept into empirical research. This study adopts a careful and rigorous empirical approach that looks at monetary policy...