This essay considers some prescriptions that are currently popular regarding exchange rate regimes: a general movement toward floating, a general movement toward fixing, or a general movement toward either extreme and away from the middle. The whole spectrum from fixed to floating is covered...

This paper, written for the NBER Conference on the Changing Role of the United States in the World Economy, covers the capital account in the U.S. balance of payments. It first traces the history from 1946 to 1980, a period throughout which Americans were steadily building up a positive net...

This paper makes use of the simulation results of 12 leading large international econometric models, as to the effects of commonly specified changes in monetary and fiscal policy, conducted under the Brookings exercise "Empirical Macroeconomics for Interdependent Economies." The first half of...

Conventional wisdom in the field of international finance holds that the U.S. economy has become so open financiallly as to be characterized by perfect capital mobility: a highly elastic supply of foreign capital prevents the domestic rate of return from rising significantly above the world rate...

The hypothesis that investors optimize with respect to the mean and variance of their end-of-period wealth has powerful implications for some standard questions of interest to international macroeconomists. The implications transcend the particular econometric technique used to estimate the...

This paper tests hypotheses regarding the parameters in investors'asset demand functions. Most important is the hypothesis that federal bonds are closer substitutes for equity than for money; it is associated with the hypothesis of "portfolio crowding out" by federal borrowing. Previous...

Undesirable real effects have been attributed to floating exchange rates in general, and the 1980-83 appreciation of the dollar in particular.In the appreciating country, the U.S., export industries lose competitiveness and so output falls. In the other country, say Europe, the exchange rate...

What explains the success of Mauritius, a top performer among African countries? It has mostly followed growth-enhancing policies, which can in turn be attributed to sound institutions. But from where did the institutions come? Mauritius chose well around the time of independence in 1968, for...

Seven possible nominal variables are considered as candidates to be the anchor or target for monetary policy. The context is countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), which tend to be price takers on world markets, to produce commodity exports subject to volatile terms of trade, and to...

Models of dynamic inconsistency in monetary policy and the need for central bank independence and commitment to nominal targets apply even more strongly to developing countries. But because most developing countries are price-takers on world markets, the small open economy model, with nontraded...