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...

This paper quantifies the costs of adhering to a fixed-exchange-rate arrangement, such as a currency union, for emerging economies. To this end it develops a novel dynamic stochastic disequilibrium model of a small open economy with monetary nonneutrality due to downward nominal wage rigidity....

This paper compares sources of disturbances to output and labour market adjustment in the US currency union compared to a set of EU countries. Comparable datasets comprising 1-digit sectoral data for 8 US regions and 8 European countries are constructed and used to study the relative importance...

We study the gains from increased wage flexibility and their dependence on exchange rate policy, using a small open economy model with staggered price and wage setting. Two results stand out: (i) the impact of wage adjustments on employment is smaller the more the central bank seeks to stabilize...

We study the gains from increased wage flexibility and their dependence on exchange rate policy, using a small open economy model with staggered price and wage setting. Two results stand out: (i) the impact of wage adjustments on employment is smaller the more the central bank seeks to stabilize...

Recently, several countries have been considered the relative merits of "dollarization", that is, adopting the currency of an anchor country. One of the main potential costs of dollarization is that macroeconomic stability may be reduced by the loss of monetary policy autonomy. In this paper, we...

We study the gains from increased wage flexibility and their dependence on exchange rate policy, using a small open economy model with staggered price and wage setting. Two results stand out: (i) the impact of wage adjustments on employment is smaller the more the central bank seeks to stabilize...

Central banks invest their foreign exchange reserves predominantly in government bonds. The global accumulation of reserves therefore affects the equilibrium in the market for government bonds of reserve currency countries. By means of a panel data analysis we examine the relationship between...

This study divides the world into currency zones according to the co-movement of each currency with the key currencies. The dollar zone groups economies that produce well over half of global GDP. The euro zone now includes almost all of Europe and some commodity producers, but remains less than...

We propose a "debt view" to explain the dominant international role of the dollar. We develop an international general equilibrium model in which firms optimally choose the currency composition of their nominal debt. Expansionary monetary policy in downturns prevents Fisherian debt deflation...