The impact of aggregate nominal and real shocks on the variance of relative prices is studied in the case of an open economy with fixed exchange rates where agents have limited information about aggregate shocks and the price level. In the first part of the paper it is shown that the limited...

A central hypothesis and concern of some skeptics of European monetary union is that monetary policy coordination to secure a peg to the German mark (DM) will tie real economic performance, especially the unemployment rate, to that in Germany. Evidence on this hypothesis can be found in Austria,...

Modern macroeconomic theory teaches us new lessons about exchange rates: Currency depreciations or appreciations that change the relative competitiveness of producers in different countries are undesirable from a global perspective if they lead to relative prices that do not reflect the true...

This paper studies the relation between the United States? bilateral real exchange rate and the associated bilateral relative price of nontraded goods for five of its most important trade relationships. Traditional theory attributes fluctuations in real exchange rates to changes in the relative...

The paper assesses the extent to which the Group of Seven (G7) has been successful in its management of major currencies since the 1970s. Using an event-study approach, the paper finds evidence that the G7 has been overall effective in moving the U.S. dollar, yen and euro in the intended...

Many explanations of the stylized facts concerning real exchange rate movements focus on monetary shocks, but it is often found empirically that monetary shocks are unimportant. I provide evidence that is contrary to this empirical finding. Using over 100 years of data, I estimate the...

We analyze the performance and robustness of some common simple rules for monetary policy in a new-Keynesian open economy model under different assumptions about the determination of the exchange rate. Adding the exchange rate to an optimized Taylor rule gives only slight improvements in terms...