A two-country general equilibrium model with large wage setters and conservative monetary authorities is employed to investigate the welfare implications of three international monetary regimes: i) non-cooperative, ii) cooperative, and iii) monetary union. The analysis shows that the unions'...

This BIS Paper discusses lessons provided by the global financial crisis for inflation targeting and financial stability. It contains selected presentations from the BIS-sponsored sessions at two Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) annual meetings: November 2008, in Rio de...

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...

It is often argued that deregulation of international transactions and its effects on the globalization of financial markets is behind the decline in the attractiveness of fixed exchange rate regimes. We argue that, instead, much of the recently observed decrease in the level of capital controls...

The aim of this paper is to empirically examine the effect of a regime switch, from exchange-rate targeting (fixed exchange rate) to inflation targeting, on monetary policy in developing economies, hence adding to evidence on whether inflation targeting along with a managed float provides a...

This paper analyzes the implications of the global financial cycle for conventional and unconventional monetary policies and macroprudential policy in small, open economies such as Canada. The paper starts by summarizing recent work on financial cycles and their growing correlation across...

Global structural factors both monetary and real played a prominent role in the burst of the subprime crisis: 1) the so-called Bretton Woods II international monetary system; 2) the reduction of US real investment return compared with competing countries. We develop a two-country partial...

In this paper, we study the effects of structural shocks that influence global risk – the main factor behind a “global capital flows cycle” – and how risk, in turn, is transmitted to capital flows. Our results show that not all the risk shocks driving the global financial cycle have the...

Major currency areas are characterized by important differences in financial structure that are clear in microeconomic data. Surprisingly, this fact is seldom discussed in the analysis of the international transmission of shocks. This paper attempts to fill this gap. First, I show some stylized...

We test a simple model of exchange rate regime choice with data for 65 non-OECD countries covering the period 1980-94. We find that the variance of output at home and in potential target countries as well as the correlation between home and foreign real activity are powerful and robust...