Exchange Rate Misalignments and Adjustments: Implications for Floating and Fixed Parity Systems.

The author presents a framework for discriminating between fixed and floating exchange rate systems and illustrates it with U.K. data over 1975-90. It is found that a fixed parity system would have been unambiguously preferred to a floating system over this period unless the parity were set sufficiently noncentrally or costs from persistent currency overvaluation were sufficiently high. Under no circumstances could a floating parity have been unambiguously preferred to a fixed parity system. Copyright 1998 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd and The Victoria University of Manchester