This paper considers the nature and the distribution of trade and FDI effects of a potential enlargement of the European Monetary Union (EMU) to the 10 countries that obtained EU membership in 2004. One-way and two-way error component gravity models are estimated using a data set of unbalanced...

On February 24-25, 2006 an international workshop on “Regional and International Currency Arrangements” was held in Vienna. It was co-sponsored by the Oesterreichische Nationalbank and the Bank of Greece, and jointly organized by Eduard Hochreiter and George Tavlas. Academic economists and...

This paper considers the nature and the distribution of trade and FDI effects of a potential enlargement of the European Monetary Union (EMU) to the ten countries that obtained EU membership in 2004. One-way and two-way error component gravity models are estimated using a dataset of unbalanced...

The paper investigates the impact of EMU on foreign direct investment flows. Using the option value approach to investment decisions, it is possible to show how exchange rate uncertainty hinders cross-border investment flows. By permanently fixing bilateral exchange rates, a currency union can...

This paper is intended to theoretically present divergent business cycles as effects of a monetary union, even in the absence of asymmetric, exogenous shocks. The main inference form the model developed in this paper says that microeconomic optimization may lead to sub-optimal macro states and...

The paper starts with the assumption that the Mercosur countries have decided to pursue monetary integration. These countries have essentially two options: a decentralized monetary union (MU) whereby each member country either pegs to the U.S. dollar or dollarizes outright; or a centralized MU...

The "currency war", as it has become known, has three aspects: 1) the inflexible pegs of undervalued currencies; 2) recent attempts by floating exchange-rate countries to resist currency appreciation; 3) quantitative easing. Europe should primarily be concerned about the first issue, which...

This paper provides an analysis of Keynes’s original Bancorʺ proposal as well as more recent proposals for fixed exchange rates. We argue that these schemes fail to pay due attention to the importance of capital movements in today’s economy, and that they implicitly adopt an unsatisfactory...

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....

A technical analysis shows that the doomsayers who support the euro at all costs and those who naively theorize that a single currency is the root of all evil are both wrong. A euro exit could be a way of getting back to growth, but at the same time it would entail serious risks, especially for...