In this article, the issue of the monetary independence problem in view of the Romania's European Monetary Union accession is investigated empirically. It is frequently argued that for such a country, the main cost of participation in a currency area is the loss of monetary policy independence....

After decades using monetary aggregates as the main instrument of monetary policy and having different varieties of crawling peg exchange rate regimes, Colombia adopted a full-fledged inflation-targeting (IT) regime in 1999, with inflation as the nominal anchor, a floating exchange rate, and the...

We document that observed international input-output linkages contribute substantially to synchronizing producer price inflation (PPI) across countries. Using a multi-country, industry-level dataset that combines information on PPI and exchange rates with international and domestic input-output...

This paper studies monetary regime choice between monetary union and flexible exchange rate regime in a large open economy framework. The classical approach emphasizes that monetary unions are inherently costly because a single interest rate cannot respond effectively to different shocks of...

On September 3-4, 2009 SUERF and Utrecht University School of Economicsorganized the Colloquium "The Quest for Stability" in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium.

The uncovered interest rate parity condition lies at the heart of the "impossible trinity", stating that the three objectives of fixed exchange rates, free capital flows, and independent monetary policy cannot be pursued simultaneously. We argue that although monetary unification does indeed...

This article investigates the potential impact of a shift in market expectations about a country's eurozone entry date on long-term yields and the spot exchange rate in a simple uncovered interest parity (UIP) framework. The results suggest that the size of the reactions depend on how far the...

Several countries face the choice between targeting inflation independently or entering a monetary union that targets inflation. The present paper extends the theory of optimum currency areas to deal with this choice. In contrast to the conventional theory, countries are shown to form more of an...

The paper studies the determinants of unemployment in a two-country model, where real wages are the outcome of the strategic interaction between various institutional players (firms, unions, central banks). We show that: (i) the results derived in the recent literature on this topic are not...

It is conventionally held that countries are worse off by forming a monetary union when it comes to macroeconomic stabilization. However, this conventional view relies on assuming that monetary policy is conducted optimally. Relaxing the assumption of optimal monetary policy not only uncovers...