This paper aims to propose a new measure of exchange market pressure for countries operating in hard peg regimes, such as currency unions, currency boards or full dollarization. We use a general model of currency crisis to derive a sustainability index based upon the relationship between the...

The study assesses the level of integration among the three Greater China economies (namely China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) and examines the suitability of a Greater China currency union. Currently, the three economies have extensive trade and investment linkages. Our analyses show that these...

The paper analyses the trade-off between exchange rate flexibility and monetary policy autonomy. It tests empirically the "Possible Duality" hypothesis, i.e. whether countries with more flexible currency regimes are indeed able to exert more monetary policy autonomy than those with less flexible...

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...

This working paper was written by Yin-wong Cheung (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Jude Yuen (University of California, Santa Cruz).The study assesses the level of integration among the three Greater China economies (namely China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) and examines the suitability of...

We use consumer price data for 81 European cities (in Germany, Austria, Finland, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Switzerland) to study the impact of the introduction of the euro on goods market integration. Employing both aggregated and disaggregated consumer price index (CPI) data we confirm...

Tiny changes in the American monetary policy can have dramatic effects on the rest of the world because of dollar's double role of national and international currency. This is the Triffin dilemma. The paper shows how it works through three examples: price of commodities, dollarization, and the...

This paper examines whether the renminbi (RMB) has supplanted the US dollar as the major anchor currency in the currency baskets of East Asian economies. First, we systematically demonstrate that existing techniques to address the problem of severe multicollinearity in estimations of the...

The debate on renminbi (RMB) revaluation has not subsided, despite the policy change announced by the Chinese authorities in July 2005. In this chapter, we show that the evidence of RMB undervaluation may not be as strong as it appears. Specifically, depending on the method used, the evidence...