Hong Kong's currency is pegged to the US dollar in a currency board arrangement. In autumn 2003, the Hong Kong dollar appreciated from close to 7.80 per US dollar to 7.70, as investors feared that the currency board would be abandoned. In the wake of this appreciation, the monetary authorities...

This paper analyzes institutional arrangements for exchange rate systems and reviews what we know. It looks at the foreign exchange market, different balance of payment situations in which countries find themselves and the necessary exchange rate adjustments. It studies the options that are...

We estimate a variety of exchange rate elasticities of international tourism. We show that, in addition to the bilateral exchange rate between the tourism origin and destination countries, the exchange rate vis-à-vis the US dollar is also an important driver of tourism flows and pricing. The...

Bolivia has achieved noteworthy success over the past 15 years in raising incomes, reducing poverty, and maintaining macroeconomic stability by deploying commodity revenues to finance transfers, public investment, and state-led development, using an exchange rate peg as a policy anchor. However,...

This paper proposes a quasi-bounded process for exchange rate dynamics within a target zone, consistent with a credible exchange rate band in which the exchange rate cannot breach the strong-side limit while the weak-side limit is only accessible under restricted conditions of the relationship...

When a country abandons a fixed, or target zone exchange regime it usually claims that the regime was "fundamentally" sound but that it was undermined by pernicious speculation. The validity of the claim is impossible to assess using only observable data-there always exists a future path of...

Currency boards are subject to runs if the foreign currency reserve is insufficient to back the convertible money supply. We construct a simple model capturing the main features of a currency board to analyze a government's decision to maintain or abandon a currency board based on the costs and...

Currency risk is one of the two components of the total interest rate differential. Hard pegs, such as currency boards, are meant to reduce or even eliminate currency risk, thus, reducing domestic interest rates. This paper investigates the patterns and determinants of the currency risk premium...

Forward exchange rates convey information about the risk premiums of the currency exposures of the investors. The extraction of these risk premiums provides market information for the expected future values of a currency, which may be useful for policymakers in their market surveillance and...