Among the policy responses to the global financial crisis, the international provision of US dollars via central bank swap lines stands out. This paper studies the build-up of stresses on banks' balance sheets that led to this coordinated policy response. Using the BIS international banking...

This paper examines the economic exposure of German corporations to changes in the DM/US-dollar exchange-rate. Our work contributes to the existing body of literature in the following ways. Firstly, we point out conceptual problems of previous attempts to estimate economic exposure. Secondly, we...

A striking and unexpected feature of the financial crisis has been the sharpappreciation of the US dollar against virtually all currencies globally. The paper findsthat negative US-specific macroeconomic shocks during the crisis have triggered asignificant strengthening of the US dollar, rather...

Recent theoretical work shows that changes in the volatility of inflation and/or unem-ployment affect equilibrium in°ation outcomes when the central banker's loss functionis asymmetric. We show that previous evidence offered in support of the propositionthat the volatility of unemployment helps...

Central banks typically find it difficult to turn off the "political pressure valve". This has important consequences for the types of monetary policies they implement. This paper presents an analysis of how political factors may come into play in the equilibrium determination of inflation. We...

Motivated by the Chinese experience, we analyze a semi-open economy where the centralbank has access to international capital markets, but the private sector has not. Thisenables the central bank to choose an interest rate different from the international rate.We examine the optimal policy of...