The high level of current account imbalances continues to be a major focus of international concern. In this paper I suggest why public and private actions in the United States and China are now likely to cause the current account imbalances in those countries to shrink and perhaps even to...

In this paper we present a model of a balance-of-payments crisis and use it to examine the Argentine experiment with a crawling peg between December 1978 and February 1981. The approach taken allows us to examine the evolution of a crisis when the collapse is not a perfectly-foreseen event. The...

Fixed and flexible exchange rates each have advantages, and a country has the right to choose the regime suited to its circumstances. Nevertheless, several arguments support the view that the de facto dollar peg may now have outlived its usefulness for China. (1) China's economy is on the...

A new technique for estimating countries' de facto exchange rate regimes synthesizes two approaches. One approach estimates the implicit de facto basket weights in an OLS regression of the local currency value rate against major currency values. Here the hypothesis is a basket peg with little...

This paper proposes a tractable and realistic nonlinear model of exchange rate dynamics, and argues that its predictions are consistent with available empirical evidence on exchange rate and interest differential behavior in real-life target zones. In our model, the exchange rate fluctuates...

This paper develops a model for valuing options on a currency which is maintained within a band. The starting point of our model is the well known Krugman model for exchange-rate behavior within a target zone. Results from model runs provide insight into evidence reported by other authors of...

In this paper we generalize the target zone exchange rate as model formalized by Krugman (1988b) to include finite-sized interventions in defense of the zone. The main contributions of these pages consist of linking the recent developments in the theory of target zones to the mirror-image theory...

This paper develops a highly simplified model of exchange rate behavior within the band under a target zone regime. It shows that the expectation that authorities will defend the band exerts a stabilizing effect on exchange rate behavior within the band, even when the authorities are not...

We examine the expected survival time of a unilateral exchange rate target zone, when constraints on monetary policy prevent the central bank from exclusively focusing on defending the target zone. Generally, the width of the target zone has a negligible effect on the expected survival time, and...

This paper develops a simple econometric procedure for estimating expected exchange rate under target zones. We employ the linear projection methodology to make predictions without relying on any prior structural or distributional assumptions, and at the same time demonstrate that such a...