We identify a disconnect between historical and model-based assessments of the costs of currency pegs due to nominal rigidities. While the former attribute major contractions and massive unemployment to currency pegs, the latter find miniscule welfare losses. The goal of this paper is to...

This paper provides a framework for evaluating how market participants' beliefs about foreign exchange target zones change as they learn about central bank intervention policy. In order to examine this behavior, we first generalize the standard target zone model to allow for intra-marginal...

We examine the impact of renminbi revaluation on firm valuations, considering two surprise announcements of changes in China's exchange rate policy in 2005 and 2010 and data on 6,050 firms in 44 countries. Renminbi appreciation has a positive effect on firms exporting to China but little...

We discuss three well known plans that were offered in the twentieth century to provide an artificial replacement for gold and key currencies as international reserves: Keynes' Bancor, the SDR and the Ecu( predecessor to the euro).The latter two of these reserve substitutes were...

This paper studies the cross-country variation of the fiscal stimulus and the exchange rate adjustment propagated by the global crisis of 2008-9, identifying the role of economic structure in accounting for the heterogeneity of response. We find that greater de facto fiscal space prior to the...

The period preceding the global financial crisis was characterized by a substantial widening of current account imbalances across the world. Since the onset of the crisis, these imbalances have contracted to a significant extent. In this paper, we analyze the ongoing process of external...

This paper addresses the issue of the optimal stock of international reserves in terms of a statistical model in which reserves affect both the probability of a Sudden Stop-as well as associated output costs-by reducing the balance-sheet effects of liability dollarization. Optimal reserves are...

Foreign-exchange operations did not end after the United States stopped its activist approach to intervention. Japan persisted in such operations, but avoided overt conflict with its monetary policy. With the on-set of the Great Recession, Switzerland has transacted in foreign exchange both for...

This paper analyzes current stresses in the two key areas that concerned the architects of the original Bretton Woods system: international liquidity and exchange rate management. Despite radical changes since World War II in the market context for liquidity and exchange rate concerns, they...

A central result in international macroeconomics is that a government cannot simultaneously opt for open financial markets, fixed exchange rates, and monetary autonomy; rather, it is constrained to choosing no more than two of these three. In the wake of the Great Recession, however, there has...