The increase in central bank transparency was one of the main developments in central banking in the last two decades. This leads to the question of which effect central bank transparency has on the volatility of exchange rates. According to theoretical considerations, more information could...

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...

Meese and Rogoff (1983) and subsequent studies find that economic fundamentals are apparently not able to explain exchange rate movements, but we argue that this so-called "Exchange Rate Disconnect Puzzle" arose because researchers such as Meese and Rogoff (1983) did not use the right...

Financial integration of emerging economies is on the rise and so are financial and monetary spillovers, especially those originating from US economic policy decisions and the (related) evolution of the US dollar. We revisit the “trilemma” vs. “dilemma” hypothesis and assess whether, and...

Over the last decade, the microstructure approach to exchange rates has become very popular. The underlying idea of this approach is that the order flows at different levels of aggregation contain valuable information to explain exchange rate movements. The bulk of empirical literature has...

According to the traditional 'optimum currency area' approach, not much will be lost from a very hard peg to a currency union if there has been little reason for variations in the exchange rate. This paper takes a different approach and highlights the fact that high exchange rate volatility may...