The Emerging Market Economies are vulnerable to adverse external shocks. Such shocks cause excessive volatility in foreign exchange markets. Faced with high volatility, the central banks in EMEs often end up, in futility, depleting their foreign exchange reserves by selling dollars to restore...

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of options volatility and bid-ask spread as microstructural variables in determining whether the foreign exchange market’s price formation process in response to macroeconomic announcements is characterised by changes in risk perception and...

Transparency in the economic sphere involves making public sector action visible and understandable to the private sector. Transparency in central bank operations can be seen a complement to the greater transparency being established in policy formulation. Among the most important areas in this...

During the last decade, a number of new financial instruments and derivative products related to the Greek drachma have emerged in local as well as international capital markets. The paper analyzes the characteristics of these financial instruments which are traded in organized exchanges and...

This paper studies the participation and performance of sophisticated versus unsophisticated auction participants in an environment with numerous bidders, uncertainty, and asymmetric information. We examine multi-unit, pay-as-bid, currency auctions conducted by the Central Bank of Venezuela. We...

This paper reviews the experience with floating interbank exchange rate systems in five developing countries--The Gambia, Guyana, Jamaica, Nigeria and Sri Lanka--and draws some conclusions about the stability and efficiency of these systems. The experience of these countries illustrates both the...

Tobin has suggested that exchange rate volatility be controlled through a tax on international financial transactions. This analysis shows that the Tobin tax as a pure transaction tax is not viable. The tax would impair financial operations and create international liquidity problems. It is also...

The paper looks at the hypothesis that financial market liberalization can create a basis for more stable exchange rates, as deviations of exchange rates from equilibrium levels bring forth stabilizing flows of liquidity. This ""endogenous liquidity"" hypothesis suggests that opening financial...