In most countries, the central bank is required to hold reserve assets as a means of providing credibility for the value of the fiat currency. These assets can be in the form of gold, foreign exchange or some other internationally recognised reserve asset and are held to permit the country to...

Here the author empirically estimates if the different monetary and exchange rate frameworks observed in the Accession Countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltics do yield different outcomes in terms of level and variance of a set of nominal and real variables. The author follows and...

The objective of our paper is to provide an empirical platform to the debate on the macroeconomic consequences of large currency appreciations. Observing the experiences of six major Asian economies (the ASEAN-5 (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Singapore) and Korea) during the...

The paper investigates the ability of monetary authorities to keep the real exchange rate undervalued over the long run by implementing a policy of accumulating foreign exchange reserves. We consider a model of a three-sector, small, open economy, where the central bank continuously purchases...

This paper studies the design of optimal monetary policy rules for emerging economies confronted to sharp capital outflows and speculative attacks. We extend Taylor type monetary policy rules by allowing the central bank to give some weight to the level of precautionary foreign reserve balances...

Over the last decade, emerging market economies have faced shocks arising from both external events and idiosyncratic factors. Brazil took advantage of benign conditions in the first decade of the century to substantially increase its foreign reserves, achieving reserves adequacy on several...

We use a cross-country panel framework to analyze the effect of net official flows (chiefly foreign exchange intervention) on current accounts. We find that net official flows have a large but plausible effect on current account balances. The estimated effects are larger with instrumental...

Since the global financial crisis, the Swiss National Bank has been accumulating reserve assets amounting to the size of the Swiss GDP. Yet, the Swiss franc is still considered to be significantly over-valued. This paper analyzes the drivers behind the new situation and discusses challenges and...

Exchange rates are crucial variables for each economy as they affect the price at which a country can exchange goods and services with other currency areas. A strong domestic currency makes it relatively cheap to import goods and services, but at the same time renders domestic goods and services...