If floating exchange rates stabilize shocks rather than create shocks, a country that joins a monetary union or fixes its exchange rate looses a stabilizing mechanism. We use a first difference structural VAR on trade weighted macroeconomic data to study the role of floating exchange rates for...

We show that empirical results concerning the behavior of floating exchange rates differ between otherwise identical cointegrated and non-cointegrated VAR models. In particular, virtually all ten-year movements in nominal exchange rates are due to fundamental supply and demand shocks when long...