This paper provides an analysis of Keynes's original Bancor proposal as well as more recent proposals for fixed exchange rates. We argue that these schemes fail to pay due attention to the importance of capital movements in today's economy, and that they implicitly adopt an unsatisfactory notion...

Conventional wisdom suggests that the European debt crisis, which has thus far led to severe adjustment programs crafted by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in both Greece and Ireland, was caused by fiscal profligacy on the part of peripheral, or noncore, countries in...

Financial stability is an important policy objective, since crises are associated with large economic, social and political costs. Promoting stability requires preventing 'sudden stops' in capital flows, which are events in which foreign financing abruptly disappears. This paper contributes to...

Openness to trade is one factor that has been identified as determining whether a country is prone to sudden stops in capital inflows, crashes in currencies, or severe recessions. Some believe that openness raises vulnerability to foreign shocks, while others believe that it makes adjustment to...

Financial stability is an important policy objective since crises are associated with big economic, social, and political costs. Promoting stability requires preventing 'sudden stops' in capital flows, which are events in which foreign financing abruptly disappears. This paper contributes to the...

We study dealer behavior in the foreign exchange spot market using a detailed data set on the complete transactions of four dealers. There is strong support for an information effect in incoming trades. Although there is evidence that the information effect increases with trade size in direct...

This paper provides evidence of private information in the interdealer foreign exchange market. In so doing it provides support for the hypothesis that information is an important reason for the strong positive correlation between order flow and returns. It also provides evidence that...

It is commonplace to link neoclassical economics to 18th- or 19th-century physics and its notion of equilibrium, of a pendulum once disturbed eventually coming to rest. Likewise, an economy subjected to an exogenous shock seeks equilibrium through the stabilizing market forces unleashed by the...

We analyze the way in which Latin American countries have adjusted to commodity terms of trade (CTOT) shocks in the 1970-2007 period. Specifically, we investigate the degree to which the active management of international reserves and exchange rates impacted the transmission of international...

An often heard view is that exchange rate variability will decrease for a country that joins the EMU. This is not necessarily true. Both real and nominal exchange rate variability increase under certain circumstances when asymmetric demand shocks occur inside or outside the union. These results...