What are the prospects for today’s top international currencies in the twenty-first century? This paper explores how the future of the top currencies — the dollar, euro and yen— will be influenced by three key considerations: the logic of market competiti

This paper examines the regime changes in the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) of the European Monetary System (EMS), applying the duration model approach to weekly data of eight currencies participating in the ERM, covering the complete EMS history. When using the non-parametric (univariate)...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the determinants of exchange rate credibility under the European Monetary System (EMS). To that end, we have considered both economic variables and political factors using data of eight currencies participating in the Exchange Rate Mechanism, covering...

We investigate how the relation between gold prices and the U.S. Dollar has been affected by the recent turmoil in financial markets. We use spot prices of gold and spot bilateral exchange rates against the Euro and the British Pound to study the pattern of volatility spillovers. We estimate the...

In our current time the idea of a global currency seems to be pathbreaking. However, the introduction of such a currency requires a uniform governance which implicates that countries lose national autonomy. Presently, countries prefer national monetary policy and national financial regulation....

Predicting the timing of currency and banking crises is likely to remain an elusive task for academics, financial market participants, and policymakers. Few foresaw the Asian crises and fewer still could have imagined their severity. However, recent events have highlighted the importance of...

This paper shows how sign restrictions can be used to identify symmetric and asymmetric shocks in a simple two-country structural VAR. Specifically, the e??ects of symmetric and asymmetric supply, demand and monetary policy shocks as well as pure exchange rate shocks are estimated. The results...

This paper analyses the role of the real exchange rate in a structural vector autoregression (sVAR) framework for the United Kingdom, Euro area, Japan and Canada vis-á-vis the United States. A new identification strategy is proposed building on sign restrictions. The results are compared to the...

This paper analyzes the empirical fit of a new approach to exchange rate target zones. Unlike most of the literature on target zones, we use an estimation procedure that takes explicitly into account the band constraints, and hence their effect on the expectations of agents. Crucially, we do not...

The renewed quest for a European monetary union raises the question: Is Europe ready for a common currency? We compare the variability and persistence of real exchange rate fluctuations within the German monetary union and between Germany and eight European countries to assess the viability of a...