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...

This paper sets out the political economy behind Asian governments' participation in a revived Bretton Woods System. The overriding problem for these governments is to rapidly integrate a large pool of underemployed labor into the industrial sector. The principal constraints are inefficient...

This paper offers new evidence on the emergence of the dollar as the leading international currency, focusing on its role as currency of denomination in global bond markets. We show that the dollar overtook sterling much earlier than commonly supposed, as early as in 1929. Financial market...

The international gold standard of the late nineteenth century has been described as a system of 'spontaneous order', capturing the idea that its architects at the time were fashioning domestic monetary systems which created a system of fixed exchange rates almost as a by-product. In contrast...

This paper analyzes the consequences of the internationalization of the Chinese renminbi for the global monetary system and its possible ascension to reserve currency status. In an unstable and financially integrated world, governments' precautionary demand for reserve assets is likely to...

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...

By the early 1960s, outstanding U.S. dollar liabilities began to exceed the U.S. gold stock, suggesting that the United States could not completely maintain its pledge to convert dollars into gold at the official price. This raised uncertainty about the Bretton Woods parity grid, and speculation...

Many economists are accustomed to thinking about Federal Reserve policy in terms of the institution's dual mandate, which refers to price stability and high employment, and in which the exchange rate and other international variables matter only insofar as they influence inflation and the output...

On the twentieth anniversary of its inception, the euro has yet to expand its role as an international currency. We document this fact with a wide range of indicators including its role as an anchor or reference in exchange rate arrangements—which we argue is a portmanteau measure—and as a...

An exchange-rate system is a set of contracts which commits central banks to intervene in the foreign-exchange market. The design features of the system include: the rules of intervention, the limits placed on exchange rates and the quot;crisis scenarioquot; which describes possible transitions...