This paper discusses the dynamic behavior of exchange rates, focusing both on the exchange rate's response to exogenous shocks and the relation between exchange-rate movements and movements in important endogenous variables such as prices, interest rates, output, and the current account. Aspects...

Once one recognizes that governments borrow international reserves and exercise other policy options to defend fixed exchange rates during currency crises, the question arises: What factors determine a government's decision to abandon a currency peg or hang on? In a setting of purposeful action...

This paper is a highly selective review of our knowledge about the scope for sterilized intervention in foreign exchange markets under alternative exchange-rate regimes. Section I demonstrates the potential importance of simultaneous-equations bias in single-equation econometric studies of the...

Knife-edge stability is a common property of dynamic monetary models assuming perfect foresight or rational expectations. These models can be closed with the assumption that the economy's equilibrium lies on the unique convergent path (the saddlepath). While this empirically plausible assumption...

The paper studies the effects of terms-of-trade fluctuations in an infinite-horizon optimizing model of a small open economy. While the current-account response to a transitory terms-of-trade shock is in part explicable by intertemporal smoothing, an important additional factor is the effect of...

This paper presents a long-run model of the open economy in a world of fixed exchange rates and imperfect substitutability between bonds denominated in different currencies. The model explicitly accounts for the wealth flow accompanying current-account imbalance and for the flow of interest...

The paper uses an intertemporal perfect-foresight optimizing model to analyze the effect of transitory terms-of-trade shocks on a small open . economy's current-account and utility time profiles. An adverse terms-of-trade shift known to be temporary induces the economy to run down its stock of...

This paper develops a dynamic continuous-time model in which international risk sharing can yield substantial welfare gains through its positive effect on expected consumption growth. The mechanism linking global diversification to growth is an attendant world portfolio shift from safe, but...

In this paper I focus on two specific hazard areas in the transition from Stage Two to Stage Three of European economic and monetary union (EMU), as well as on some key problems of Stage Three that EMU's monetary and fiscal structures appear ill-prepared to handle. The transitional hazards are...

This paper analyzes the constraints European Union law places on the 1 January 1999" choices of irrevocably fixed conversion rates between the Euro and the currencies of EMU" member states. Current EU legislation, notably the Maastricht treaty bilateral currency conversion factors implied by the...