The paper reviews the obstacles to successful international macroeconomic policy coordination, and then offers a proposal for coordination that is designed to have the best chance of overcoming these obstacles: an international version of nominal GNP targeting. There are three sorts of obstacles...

The paper reviews recent trends in thinking on exchange rate regimes. It begins by classifying countries into regimes, noting the distinction between de facto and de jure regimes, but also noting the low correlation among proposed ways of classifying the latter. The advantages of fixed exchange...

This paper reaches seven conclusions regarding the Yen Bloc that Japan is reputed to be forming in Pacific Asia. (1) Gravity-model estimates of bilateral trade show that the level of trade in East Asia is biased intra-regionally, as it is within the European Community and within the Western...

Volatility tests are an alternative to regression tests for evaluating the joint null hypothesis of market efficiency and risk neutrality. Acomparison of the power of the two kinds of tests depends on what the alternative hypothesis is taken to be. By considering tests based on conditional...

International asset demands are functions of expected returns.Optimal portfolio theory tells us that the coefficients in this relationship depend on the variance-covariance matrix of real returns.But previous estimates of the optimal portfolio (1) assume expected returns constant and (2) are not...

Andy Rose (2000), followed by many others, has used the gravity model of bilateral trade on a large data set to estimate the trade effects of monetary unions among small countries. The finding has been large estimates: Trade among members seems to double or triple, that is, to increase by...

The Feldstein-Horioka finding, that national saving and investment have been highly correlated in the past, has not been primarily due to econometric problems such as endogenous fiscal policy; it has held up equally well when instrumental variables are used. But the inflow of capital to the...

Fears that globalization necessarily hurts the environment are not well-founded. A survey reveals little statistical evidence, on average across countries, that openness to international trade undermines national attempts at environmental regulation through a race to the bottom' effect. If...

Fixed and flexible exchange rates each have advantages, and a country has the right to choose the regime suited to its circumstances. Nevertheless, several arguments support the view that the de facto dollar peg may now have outlived its usefulness for China. (1) China's economy is on the...

Survey data provide a measure of exchange rate expectations that is superior to the commonly-used forward exchange rate in the respect that it does notinclude a risk premium. We use survey data and the technique of bootstrapping to test a number of propositions of interest. We are able to reject...