On September 3-4, 2009 SUERF and Utrecht University School of Economicsorganized the Colloquium "The Quest for Stability" in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium.

In focusing on the 24 month window prior to the onset of the crisis, the criteria for ranking the indicators presented in our related work does not distinguish between a signal given 12 months prior to the crisis and one given one month prior to the crisis. In what follows we examine this issue,...

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 examines the effects of inflation targeting on industrial and emerging economies' output growth over the "globalization years" of 1986-2004. Controlling for trade openness and two indicators of financial globalization, the authors find systematic positive and significant effects of...

This paper briefly reviews the IMF’s current practices and policy-making in the context of a proposed quadrupling of IMF resources to $1 trillion dollars, and a consequent increase in the Fund’s influence over economic policy-making in developing countries. It finds that the IMF is still...

This paper uses the principles of the monetary approach model of balance of payments and exchange market pressure to analyze the fluctuations in the international reserves of LDCs. The motivation for this analysis derives from the recent emphasis of the debt reduction policies that target the...

Historical experience is often invoked in the modern debate on competition among reserve currencies, yet little is known about quantitative aspects or institutional features of reserve management. By drawing on newly obtained data on foreign exchange reserves, especially those broken down by...

Official holdings of US dollar reserves are partly invested outside the United States. These offshore investments do not strictly speaking finance the US current account, but do support the US dollar. Offshore holdings grow fast when intervention is large.

In the literature on currency and banking crises it has become the standard procedure to distinguish pure currency crises, pure banking crises and combined (“twin”) currency and banking crises. We show theoretically and empirically that a similar differentiation should be chosen with regard...

The emerging-market crises of the 1990s were characterized by crashes in exchange rates, credit flows, and output, and the currency crashes caused the other two. Because local banks and firms had large foreign-currency debts, the sharp depreciations of their countries' currencies had huge...