The main strength of today's international monetary system – its flexibility and adaptability to the different needs of its users – can also become its weakness, as it may contribute to unsustainable growth models and imbalances. The global financial crisis has shown that the system cannot...

When does the combination of flexible exchange rates and domestic inflation-oriented monetary policy guarantee insulation from global financial conditions? We examine a dynamic global game model of international portfolio flows where, for some combination of parameters, the unique equilibrium...

This paper examines how the choice of exchange rate regime can signal financial rectitude and, in so doing, influence a country's ability to borrow internationally in domestic currency. We develop a model in which the constant probability of a 'type change' creates incentives for disciplined...

Recent improvements in statistical methodologies and data availability are facilitating detailed, high-frequency, timely macroeconomic balance sheet analysis. This paper provides practical instruction on how to design the framework to analyze vulnerabilities in a country as well as an overview...

We propose a "debt view" to explain the dominant international role of the dollar and provide broad empirical support for it. Within a simple capital structure model in which firms optimally choose the currency composition of their debt, we derive conditions under which all firms issue debt in a...

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...

With the spectre of the Euro crisis hunting embryonic monetary unions, we use a dynamic model of a small open economy to analyze REERs imbalances and examine whether the movements in the aggregate real exchange rates are consistent with the underlying macroeconomic fundamentals in the proposed...

We assess the behavior of real effective exchange rates (REERs) of members of the CEMAC zone with respect to their long-term equilibrium paths. A reduced form of the fundamental equilibrium exchange rate (FEER) model is estimated and associated misalignments are derived for the period 1980 to...

The EMU crisis holds special lessons for existing monetary unions. We assess the behavior of real effective exchange rates (REERs) of members of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) zone with respect to their long-term equilibrium paths. A reduced form of the fundamental...