The question asked in this paper is why people continue to use foreign currencies even after their economies have stabilized. Survey data for Croatia, Slovenia and Slovakia are employed to provide an answer. The results confirm the role of network effects and of remittances. Furthermore, the...

We present new evidence on de facto euroization in eleven Central, Eastern and Southeastern European countries. Estimates of the extent of foreign currency cash holdings are derived from survey data. Furthermore, we define overall euroization indices, relating both assets and cash holdings....

Monetary policy in CEE is an important determinant in the wage bargaining process, because trade unions have to predict inflation as one component of future real wages. This paper scrutinizes whether countries in CEE that officially announce an inflation target are tempted to act...

In the repo market, forward agreements are security-specific (i.e., there are no deliverable substitutes), which makes it an ideal place to measure the value of fluctuations in a security's available supply. In this study, we quantify the scarcity value of Treasury collateral by estimating the...

We characterise the behaviour of Norwegian output, the real exchange rate and real money balances over a period of almost two centuries. The empirical analysis is based on a new annual data set that has recently been compiled and covers the period 1830-2003. We apply multivariate linear and...

Central banks invest their foreign exchange reserves predominantly in government bonds. The global accumulation of reserves therefore affects the equilibrium in the market for government bonds of reserve currency countries. By means of a panel data analysis we examine the relationship between...

This is a comparative study on the historical experience of real effective exchange rate (REER) misalignment of Japanese yen, Deutsche mark, Singapore dollar and Taiwan dollar, with regard to the recent dispute over the Renminbi (RMB) valuation. Panel-based misalignment estimates of the four...

Recent advances in testing for the validity of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) focus on the time series properties of real exchange rates in panel frameworks. One weakness of such tests, however, is that they fail to inform the researcher as to which cross-section units are stationary. As a...

The empirical literature that tests for purchasing power parity (PPP) by focusing on the stationarity of real exchange rates has so far provided, at best, mixed results. The yen real exchange rate behavior, as compared to other major currencies, has most stubornly challenged the PPP hypothesis...

Central banks' international reserves have increased significantly in the recent past. While this accumulation has been widely perceived as precautionary savings to prevent financial crises, rising reserves might also endanger monetary and financial stability. This paper sheds new light on the...