This paper surveys the performance of international capital markets and the literature on measuring international capital mobility. Three main functions of a globally integrated and efficient world capital market provide focal points for the analysis. First, asset-price arbitrage ensures that...

This paper analyses the constraints European Union law places on the 1 January 1999 choices of irrevocably fixed conversion rates between the euro and the currencies of EMU members states. Current EU legislation, notably the Maastricht Treaty, requires that the bilateral currency conversion...

Simple techniques of regulated Brownian motion are used to analyse the behaviour of the exchange rate when official policy reaction functions are subject to future stochastic changes. We examine exchange rate dynamics in cases where the authorities promise (i) to confine a floating rate within a...

What determines sovereign risk? We study the London bond market from the 1870s to the 1930s. Our findings support conventional wisdom concerning the limited credibility of the interwar gold standard. Before 1914, gold standard adherence effectively signalled credibility and shaved 40 to 60 basis...

We develop an analytically tractable two-country model that marries a full account of global macroeconomic dynamics to a supply framework based on monopolistic competition and sticky nominal prices. The model offers simple and intuitive predictions about exchange rates and current accounts that...

In the face of huge balance of payments surpluses and internal inflationary pressures, China has been in a classic conflict between internal and external balance under its dollar currency peg. Over the longer term, China’s large, modernizing, and diverse economy will need exchange rate...

This paper develops a dynamic continuous-time model in which international risk sharing can yield substantial welfare gains through its positive effect on expected consumption growth. The mechanism linking global diversification to growth is an attendant world portfolio shift from safe, but...

The discomfort a government suffers from speculation against its currency determines the strategic incentives of speculators and the scope for multiple currency-market equilibria. After describing an illustrative model in which high unemployment may cause an exchange rate crisis with...

The interwar period was marked by the end of the classical gold standard regime and new levels of macroeconomic disorder in the world economy. The interwar disorder is often linked to policies inconsistent with the constraint of the open-economy trilemma - the inability of policy-makers...

This paper surveys the evolution of international capital mobility since the late-nineteenth century. It begins with an overview of empirical evidence on the fall and rise of integration in the global capital market. A discussion of institutional developments focuses on the use of capital...