This paper analyses the factors that govern the choice of the currency composition of official foreign exchange reserves. First, we introduce a new panel dataset on the key currencies in foreign exchange reserves of about 60 economies in the 1999-2017 period. Second, we show that the currency...

Central banks manage over $12 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, influencing global exchange rates and asset prices. However, some of the largest holders of reserves report minimal information about their currency composition, hindering empirical analysis. I describe a Hidden Markov Model to...

Using data from more than 100 economies for the period of 1975 to 2005, we conduct an extensive empirical analysis of the determinants of international reserve holdings. Four groups of determinants, namely, traditional macro variables, financial variables, institutional variables, and dummy...