This study grounds the establishment of EMU and the euro in the context of the history of international monetary cooperation and of monetary unions, above all in the U.S., Germany and Italy. The purpose of national monetary unions was to reduce transactions costs of multiple currencies and...

This paper integrates exchange-rate policy into a model of exchange- rate behavior, and examines the data econometrically to infer hypotheses about policy behavior in the 1970s. The model shows how unanticipated movements in money, the current account, and relative price levels will cause first...

We test whether fixed exchange rate regimes are ever credible in emerging markets by analyzing the behavior of short-term domestic trade bills across countries during the classical gold standard period, the most widely used hard peg in modern financial history. We exploit the fact that global...

Formation of the Euro area raises new questions about the coordination of monetary and fiscal policy. Using a New Neoclassical Synthesis (NNS) model, we show that a common monetary policy, responding to area-wide aggregates, has asymmetric effects on countries within the union, depending on...

This paper analyzes the long-run determinants of inflation differentials in a monetary union. First, we aim at establishingsome stylized facts relating the regional dispersion in headline inflation rates in the euro area as well as in the main components of the consumer price index. We find that...

In our European Economic Review (2002) paper, we used pre-1998 data on countries participating in and leaving currency unions to estimate the effect of currency unions on trade using (then-) conventional gravity models. In this paper, we use a variety of empirical gravity models to estimate the...

This paper investigates the design of an exchange rate policy for an economy where the domestic capital market is segmented from the global financial market, producers rely on credit to finance working capital needs, and the labor market is characterized by nominal contracts. We show that the...