The desirability of fiscal constraints in monetary unions depends critically on whether the monetary authority can commit to follow its policies. If it can commit, then debt constraints can only impose costs. If it cannot commit, then fiscal policy has a free-rider problem, and debt constraints...

The world's major money printers are in trouble. The debt-based monetary architecture is going through serious stress. The recent banking and sovereign debt crises are systemic symptoms indicating an upcoming and unavoidable change in money creation methodology. This paper addresses the key...

This paper highlights some of the theoretical and practical implications for monetary policy and exchange rates that derive specifically from the presence of a global general equilibrium factor embedded in neutral real policy rates in open economies. Using a standard two country DSGE model, we...

I argue that countries' dollar-denominated net external debt (dollar debt) helps explain the large differences in risk premia across currencies and how U.S. monetary policy affects the global economy. When the U.S. dollar strengthens, the real value of dollar debt increases, weakening the...

Applying basic statistical methods to a large sample of currency crises, it is shown that a variety of measures of monetary policy are significantly related to the outcome of a speculative attack. Unlike in the comparable study of Kraay (1999), discount rates have a significant but...

The last few years have seen a significant re-evaluation of the models used to analyze crises in emerging markets. Recent models typically stress financial constraints or distorted financial incentives. While this certainly represents progress, these models share a weakness with the earlier...

The last few years have seen a significant re-evaluation of the models used to analyze crises in emerging markets. Recent models typically stress financial constraints or distorted financial incentives. While this certainly represents progress, these models share a weakness with the earlier...

During emerging market crises, domestic agents might have sufficient collateral to borrow from the other domestic agents, but they are unable to borrow from foreigners because the country, as a whole, lacks international collateral. In this setting, we show that an (ex-post) optimizing central...

We propose a two-step approach to estimate multi-dimensional monetary policy shocks and their causal effects requiring only daily financial market data and policy events. First, we combine a heteroscedasticity-based identification scheme with recursive zero restrictions along the term structure...