This paper analyzes institutional arrangements for exchange rate systems and reviews what we know. It looks at the foreign exchange market, different balance of payment situations in which countries find themselves and the necessary exchange rate adjustments. It studies the options that are...

Capital flight has characterized the transformation process in Russia. Inflows of foreign direct investment have been minor and have been preceeded by inflows of portfolio capital. The paper shows that uncertainty about macroeconomic stabilization exhibits a strong negative effect on the volume...

Evidence on the effectiveness of FX interventions is either limited to short horizons or hampered by debatable identification. We address these limitations by identifying a structural vector autoregressive model for the daily frequency with an external instrument. Generally, we find, for freely...

We construct a novel database of monthly foreign exchange interventions for 49 countries over up to 22 years. We build on a text classification approach that extracts information about interventions from news articles and calibrate our procedure to data about actual interventions. Our new...

Previous studies have mainly used reports in the financial press to analyze the link between the interventions of the Bank of Japan (BoJ) and exchange rate volatility. We use official intervention data for the period 1993-2000 that were released only recently by the BoJ and find that the...

It is conventionally held that countries are worse off by forming a monetary union when it comes to macroeconomic stabilization. However, this conventional view relies on assuming that monetary policy is conducted optimally. Relaxing the assumption of optimal monetary policy not only uncovers...

It is conventionally held that countries are worse off by forming a monetary union when it comes to macroeconomic stabilization. However, this conventional view relies on assuming that monetary policy is conducted optimally. Relaxing the assumption of optimal monetary policy not only uncovers...

In this paper we analyze disinflation policy when a central bank has imperfect information about private sector inflation expectations but learns about them from economic outcomes, which are in part the result of the disinflation policy. The form of uncertainty is manifested as uncertainty about...

The paper reviews the recent conduct of monetary policy and the central bank's rule-based behavior in Russia. Using different policy rules, we test whether the central bank in Russia reacts to changes in inflation, output gap and the exchange rate in a consistent and predictable manner. Our...

Whether countries benefit from forming a monetary union depends critically on the way monetary policy is conducted. This is mainly because monetary policy determines whether and to what extent a flexible nominal exchange rate fosters or hampers macroeconomic stabilization, even if monetary...