This Article IV Consultation reports that Switzerland’s exchange rate floor, seen as credible by the markets, has halted appreciation and helped shore up the economy. Once growth recovers and inflation reaches more comfortable levels, maintaining the exchange rate commitment risks stoking...

We explore a model intended to capture the interaction between exchange rate policy, fiscal policy, and outright default on foreign-currency denominated debt. We examine how the exchange rate affects the supply of short-term debt facing the government. We show that under a credible hard peg...

The “hollowing-out,” or “two poles” hypothesis is tested in the context of a Markov chain model of exchange rate transitions. In particular, two versions of the hypothesis—that hard pegs are an absorbing state, or that fixes and floats form a closed set, with no transitions to...

The credibility of the exchange rate bands in the Nordic countries during 1987-91 is examined with two tests. The results suggest that the credibility of Finland’s exchange rate band within a twelve-month horizon could not be rejected except in the fall of 1991; however, the band lacked...

This paper examines the question of how to design an optimal and sustainable exchange rate regime in a world economy of two interdependent countries. It develops a Barro-Gordon type two-country model and compares noncooperative equilibria under different assumptions of monetary policy...