The three exchange rate regimes adopted by Italy from 1883 up to the eve of World War I - the gold standard (1883-1893), floating rates (1894-1902), and “gold shadowing” (1903-1911) - produced a puzzling result: formal adherence to the gold standard ended in failure while shadowing the gold...

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...

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....

Specialists in international finance have long been impressed by the fragility of currency pegs. Yet Danmarks Nationalbank has been able to maintain the krone's peg to the euro since the euro came into existence in 1999, and the krone's peg to the Deutschmark and SDR for 17 years before that....

The 14 Pacific developing member countries (DMCs) of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) have opted for very different exchange rate regimes with varying degrees of flexibility. Whereas several microstates have adopted an external currency as their legal tender, others have decided to use a basket...

The European sovereign debt crisis revived the discussion concerning the pros and cons of exchange rate adjustment in the face of asymmetric shocks. Exit from the euro area is to regain rapidly international competitiveness. Exchange rate stability with structural reforms could be beneficial for...

Conditional on choosing a pegged exchange rate regime, what determines the currency to which countries peg or anchor their exchange rate? This paper aims to answer this question using a panel multinomial logit framework, covering more than 100 countries for the period 1980-1998. We find that...

In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, the central banks of small open economies such as the Swiss National Bank (SNB) implemented a unilateral one-sided exchange rate target zone vis- à-vis the euro currency to counteract deflationary pressures. Recently, the SNB abandoned its...

It is commonly thought that an open economy can accommodate output shocks through either exchange rate or real sector adjustments. We formalise this notion by incorporating labour market rigidities into an "escape clause" model of currency crises. We show that the absence of structural reform...

This article is an examination of the distribution of the types of exchange-rate policy and of monetary policy in 2014. In particular, the changes since 2011 are examined. Exchange-rate systems range from free floating, in which intervention occurs only exceptionally, to hard pegs, in which a...