Target Zones and Realignments.

Recent contributions emphasize that the presence of exchange-rate target zones has important effects on the within-band behavior of exchange rates when agents are forward-looking. The authors find that the implications of available models are inconsistent with European exchange-rate data, and they suggest that the frequent realignments occurring in the period they consider may be responsible for this. They construct a model in which the likelihood of a realignment in the near future increases as the exchange rate approaches the limits of its fluctuation band and show that its implications are broadly consistent with the evidence. Copyright 1992 by American Economic Association.