If Stage Three of EMU starts on 1 January 1999, transition issues remain on two time scales. Until 1 July 2002, national currencies and the euro coexist as legal tender. We argue that intra-EMU currency risk exists in principle during that period, but that no EMU member can be forced out through...

Central banks can go broke and have done so, although mainly in developing countries. The conventional balance sheet of the central bank is uninformative about the financial resources it has at its disposal and about its ability to act as an effective lender of last resort and market marker of...

This paper tests two central assumptions regarding transforming economies: that the initial exchange rates were strongly undervalued and that the subsequent evolution of the real exchange rate was both a response to the initial undervaluation and an equilibrium real appreciation. The econometric...

We propose that analysis of purchasing power parity (PPP) and the law of one price (LOOP) should explicitly take into account the possibility of ‘commodity points’ – thresholds delineating a region of no central tendency among relative prices, possibly due to lack of perfect arbitrage in...

We fit nonlinearly mean-reverting models to real dollar exchange rates over the post-Bretton Woods period, consistent with a theoretical literature on transaction costs in international arbitrage. The half lives of real exchange rate shocks, calculated through Monte Carlo integration, imply...

In this Paper we assess the progress made by the profession in understanding whether and how exchange rate intervention works. To this end, we review the theory and evidence on official intervention, concentrating primarily on work published within the last decade or so. Our reading of the...

The half-life of deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP) plays a central role in the ongoing debate about the ability of macroeconomic models to account for the time series behaviour of the real exchange rate. The main contribution of this paper is a general framework in which alternative...

As the European Community (EC) unifies its financial markets and fixes its exchange rates, the EFTA countries are liberalizing capital movements to the same extent. The EFTA countries thus face a decision on financial markets and exchange rate policy: should they essentially join the European...

While the global financial crisis was centered in the United States, it led to a surprising appreciation in the dollar, suggesting global dollar illiquidity. In response, the Federal Reserve partnered with other central banks to inject dollars into the international financial system. Empirical...