On global scale, central banks' holdings of foreign reserves have escalated sharply in recent years. World international reserves holdings have risen significantly from US$1.2 trillion in 1995 to nearly US$10.0 trillion in June 2011. Dominant among these reserves are concentrated in the hands of...

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...

The resurgence of private capital inflows into Asia in recent years has raised the question of whether the region is susceptible to yet another financial crisis. While a sudden large-scale reversal of capital flows is not likely to result in a liquidity crunch or balance of payments crisis, the...

We investigate the impact of the European Central Bank's monetary policy announcements on the level and volatility of the EUR-US Dollar exchange rate employing an AR-FIGARCH specification. Using high-frequency data we estimate the individual and complementary effects of the release of the...

Recent literature has argued that exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) into domestic inflation has been declining in many countries following a dramatic change in inflation environment during the 1990s. Available empirical results face two central challenges: (i) the evidence on declining ERPT is...

Japan still suffers a deflationary hangover from the great episodic yen appreciations of the 1980s into the mid-1990s. Money wages are still declining, and short-term interest rates remain trapped near zero. After Japan’s “lost decade” from 1992 to 2002, however, output has begun to grow...

The adoption of quantitative easing (QE) policy by the United States (US) Federal Reserve Bank since early 2009 has aroused widespread concerns in Asia and elsewhere regarding its possible impact in terms of the weakening of the US dollar and stimulating capital outflows to emerging economies...

Due to buoyant capital inflows East Asian central banks with exchange rate targets accumulate foreign reserves and thereby increase surplus liquidity. East Asian central banks with more flexible exchange rate regimes also face surplus liquidity that mainly emanates from past accumulation of...

Monetary policy in CEE is an important determinant in the wage bargaining process, because trade unions have to predict inflation as one component of future real wages. This paper scrutinizes whether countries in CEE that officially announce an inflation target are tempted to act...

The paper contributes to understanding the economic dynamics at the zero lower bound and the exchange rate movements under different central bank intervention regimes. It provides a theoretical framework for modeling foreign exchange interventions at the ZLB within a dynamic general equilibrium...