This paper studies regimes of managed exchange rates for a small open economy with an integrated capital market, rational expectations in financial markets, sluggish nominal wages and prices, and supply shocks that follow a Brownian motion. Each regime can be characterized by the degree to which...

The size and economic relevance of Europe may imply a new role for the EURO in the international financial markets. But will the EURO compete with the $US and the Yen for a place in the basket of international currencies? Will that induce a bipolar or indeed tri-polar system, and with what...

*The European Union will enter Stage Three of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999. The development of euro financial markets and thickness externalities in the use of the euro as means of payment will be the major factors determining the importance of the euro as an international currency....

Three of the most important recent facts in global macroeconomics - the sustained rise in the US current account deficit, the stubborn decline in long run real rates, and the rise in the share of US assets in global portfolio - appear as anomalies from the perspective of conventional wisdom and...

This paper examines the macroeconomic aftermath of the 1992 breakdown of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). The economic performance of six "leaver" nations is compared with five "stayer" nations that maintained a roughly fixed parity with the Deutsche Mark. Recent writing about...

This paper reviews the problems that must be resolved at the Intergovernmental Conference in 1996 to clear the way for European Monetary Union: locking in Germany's commitment to the project, and reconciling EMU with variable geometry. It reviews what we know about the costs and benefits of EMU...

This article provides an overview of recent research into the macroeconomic costs and benefits of monetary unification. We are primarily interested in Europe’s monetary union. Given that unification entails the loss of a policy instrument its potential benefits have to be found elsewhere....

This paper tests whether trade in new goods is partially responsible for the pro-trade effects of the euro and provides a measure of the size of the effect. It works with a very large data set (about 16 million observations) covering twenty countries at the most disaggregated level of trade data...

The distributional effects of the minimum wage are analysed in a model where skilled and unskilled labour enter the production function. It is argued that distributional goals are best achieved by letting the labour market clear and achieving redistribution through taxes and transfers.

It is well known that the neoclassical model does not generate comovement among macroeconomic aggregates in response to news about future total factor productivity. We show that this problem is generally more severe in open economy versions of the neoclassical model. We present an open economy...