The carry trade strategy involves selling forward currencies that are at a forward premium and buying forward currencies that are at a forward discount. We compare the payoffs to the carry trade applied to two different portfolios. The first portfolio consists exclusively of developed country...

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.

When Argentine sovereign default in December 2001 led to a collapse of the peso, the burden of dollar debt became demonstrably unsustainable. But it was not clear what restructuring was feasible, nor when. Eventually, in 2005 after a delay of more than three years, a supermajority of creditors...

The Balassa-Samuelson model, which explains real exchange rate movements in terms of sectoral productivities, rests on two components. First, the model implies that the relative price of non-traded goods in each country should reflect the relative productivity of labour in the traded and...

I address the issue of the 'number' of International Monetary Equilibria that the international finance model of Geanakoplos and Tsomocos (2002) possesses. The mainstream competitive model has locally unique equilibria with respect to the real side of the economy; however, it manifests nominal...

Cuadernos de Economía has been published since 1963. During these 35 years a large part of the articles have dealt with the Chilean economy. The purpose of this paper is to analyze some important aspects of the Chilean economy, as they have been viewed th

The paper casts the analysis of recent monetary developments in Europe and the future prospects for Economic and Monetary Union in historical perspective. The first part (the ‘past’) reconstructs the long march toward monetary union. The second part (the

The exchange rate arrangement represents an important policy choice for emerging and transitional economies as they strive to become stable and market-driven. A wide variety of arrangements have emerged, ranging from currency boards, basket-currency pegs and single-currency pegs to floating...

The authors examine the institutional and governance framework of modern central banks to determine whether there are lessons that can be applied to the International Monetary Fund's (IMF's) institutional framework. Such a comparison is appealing for two reasons. First, both central banks and...

Papers on international business cycles have documented spurious welfare reversals: incomplete markets produce a higher level of welfare than the complete market. This paper first demonstrates how conventional linearization, as used in King, Plosser, and Rebelo (1988), can generate approximation...