This essay considers strategies that developing and emerging-market economies might use when seeking to exit from currency pegs. It also considers techniques for completing the move to greater flexibility, as well as the scope for adopting inflation targeting as a nominal anchor following an...

This essay takes a fresh look at the lender-of-last-resort issue and asks whether, how, and to what extent national practices should be adapted to the international environment. It begins by reviewing national practices. Then it analyzes, through both theory and evidence, the features that make...

In September 1997, at its Hong Kong meeting, the Interim Committee of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) adopted a statement on the liberalization of international capital movements. It asked the executive boeard of the Fund to complete work on an amendment to the IMF's Articles of Agreement...

This essay is based on the 1997-98 Frank D. Graham Memorial Lecture, which I had the honor of presenting at Princeton University on April 9, 1998. Frank Graham was deeply concerned with the interplay among national policy sovereignty, exchange-rate regimes, and price-level stability. Today, the...

Financial revolutions in Europe have been ascribed to the Italian innovation of the bill of exchange in the thirteenth century and to the British ordering of government debt at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. Less attention has been paid to the series of...

This essay examines the connection between the establishment of a common market and additional moves to monetary and political union. It then reviews both the monetary and fiscal aspects of ninteenth-century German unification. Finally, it discusses what modern Europe can and should learn from...

Monetary and financial stability are of central importance to the effective functioning of a market economy. They provide the basis for rational decisionmaking about the allocation of real resources through time and therefore improve the climate for saving and investment.

This essay offers an analysis of actual German and Swiss monetary policy that explains this gap between operation and performance. It shows that neither country's central bank can be called a monetary targeter, according to a strict, formal definition of targeting, and it argues that the...

This paper is about the financial support fund of the OECD.

This essay makes the assumption that the euro is coming and seeks to understand the implications of its arrival for the US dolar. In particular, it investigates the motives for, and implications of, shifts of funds by international portfolio managers in response to the euro's introduction.