Exchange market pressure (EMP) measures the pressure on a currency to depreciate. It adds to the actual depreciation a weighted combination of policy instruments used to ward off depreciation, such as interest rates and foreign exchange interventions, where the weights are their effectiveness....

If there is exchange market pressure (EMP), monetary authorities can use the interest rate and official interventions to offset this depreciation tendency, or they can let the exchange rate change. We introduce a new approach to derive how these three variables should be combined to measure EMP....

On 4 March 2011, SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum and the National Bank of Poland jointly organised a conference on the theme of: "Monetary Policy after the Crisis". Following a call for papers with a large number of submissions, the scientific committee selected 9 papers, which...

This paper compares the performance of economies with different monetary regimes during the last quarter century. The conclusions include: (1) There is little evidence that inflation targeting affects performance in advanced economies, but some evidence of benefits in emerging economies; (2)...

The first known experiment with an exchange rate band took place in Austria-Hungary between 1896 and 1914. The rationale for introducing this policy rested on precisely those intuitions that the modern literature has emphasized: the band was designed to secure both exchange rate stability and...

In this paper, we examine whether financial spillovers from the European Central Bank's monetary policy have consequences for the effectiveness of domestic monetary policy in three small open economies (SOEs) that are highly integrated with the European (Monetary) Union: Denmark, Norway, and...

Virtual currencies are a contemporary form of private money. Thanks to their technological properties, their global transaction networks are relatively safe, transparent, and fast. This gives them good prospects for further development. However, they remain unlikely to challenge the dominant...

Throughout the crisis, the ECB implemented a number of unprecedented measures with a wider and wider reach. These measures included a decrease of the policy rate to virtually zero, the extension of the maturities of its liquidity providing operations, an expansion in total liquidity injected in...

During recent years, central banks have increased the levels of their international reserves at an unprecedented pace. In this paper, we introduce new country-specific reserve data and examine determinants of the composition of international reserves. Using a dataset of 36 countries (and the...