Despite major recent advance in the literature on financial crises, the key role of central banks in the dynamics of financial crises are still not well understood. Our aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of financial crises by explicitly modeling the strategic options...

Restrictions on international capital transactions and other payments are usually designed to limit volatile short-term capital flows ( hot money ) and stabilize the exchange rate. Their imposition, however, may have the opposite effect by inadvertently signaling the continuation of...

This paper analyzes the implications of currency crises in a model with unique equilibrium. Starting from a typical multiple equilibria model with self-fulfilling expectations we introduce noisy information, following Morris/Shin (1999). Under certain conditions for the noise parameter, all...

Essentially, the impact of the currency union on member countries depends on whether the common currency area is optimal in the sense that the effect of the asymmetric shocks is small, Mundell (1961). Typically, researchers use VAR of different types to analyze the data. For robustness, we use...

Based on the theory of static replication of variance swaps we assess the sign and magnitude of variance risk premiums in foreign exchange markets. We find significantly negative risk premiums when realized variance is computed from intraday data with low frequency. As a likely consequence of...

Recently various exchange rate models capturing the dynamics during the transition from an exchange rate arrangement of floating rates into a currency union have been derived. Technically, these stochastic equilibrium models are diffusion processes which have to be estimated by discretely...

We show that the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) puzzle, whereby the half-life of the shock to the real exchange rate is long and unjustifiable by monetary and financial shocks, is a result of specification and estimation issues. We provide an alternative specification for PPP and show that the...

This paper presents a model of political competition, where voter decisions are affected by their ideological adherence to political parties. We derive a number of interesting results: First, we show that an equilibrium exists even though voting is fully deterministic. Second, although...

This paper studies the design of optimal monetary policy rules for emerging economies confronted to sharp capital outflows and speculative attacks. We extend Taylor type monetary policy rules by allowing the central bank to give some weight to the level of precautionary foreign reserve balances...