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...

The policy Trilemma (the ability to accomplish only two out of three policy objectives -financial integration, exchange rate stability and monetary autonomy) continues to be a valid macroeconomic framework. The financial globalization during 1990s-2000s reduced the weighted average of exchange...

Recent studies on the growth effects of exchange rate regimes offer a wide range of different, sometimes contradictory results. In this paper, we systematically compare three prominent contributions in this field. Using a common data set, a common specification, and common estimation methods, we...

We argue that a higher share of the private sector in a country's external debt raises the incentive to stabilize the exchange rate. We present a simple model in which exchange rate volatility does not affect agents' welfare if all the debt is incurred by the government. Once we introduce...

Financial turmoil is becoming a fact of life in Latin America. The 1990s have been characterized by enormous volatility in the magnitude and cost of capital flows. The correlation of capital swings across disparate countries suggests that the quality of emerging market policies in addition to...

Central bank credit has expanded dramatically since the beginning of 2007 in some of the euro area member countries. This paper makes two contributions to understand this stylized fact. First, we discuss a simple model of monetary policy that includes (i) a credit channel and (ii) a common pool...

This paper sets up a simple model for interventions and interest rate setting assuming that the policy maker cares about deviations in inflation from a target level. Under a quadratic cost of interest rate adjustments and interventions the policy maker should use a combination of interest rate...

Using the indexes we developed (Aizenman, Chinn, and Ito, 2008) to measure the degree of the three policy choices countries make with respect to the trilemma: exchange rate stability, monetary independence, and capital account openness, we investigate the normative questions pertaining to the...

We develop a methodology that intuitively characterizes the choices countries have made with respect to the trilemma during the post Bretton-Woods period. The paper first outlines the new metrics for measuring the degree of exchange rate flexibility, monetary independence, and capital account...