We examine the impact of renminbi revaluation on firm valuations, considering two surprise announcements of changes in China's exchange rate policy in 2005 and 2010 and data on 6,050 firms in 44 countries. Renminbi appreciation has a positive effect on firms exporting to China but little...

This paper offers empirical evidence that a country's choice of exchange rate regime can have a signifficant impact on its medium-term rate of productivity growth. Moreover, the impact depends critically on the country's level of financial development, its degree of market regulation, and its...

Alexander Swoboda is one of the originators of the bipolar view that capital mobility creates pressure for countries to abandon intermediate exchange rate arrangements in favor of greater flexibility and harder pegs. This paper takes another look at the evidence for this hypothesis using two...

This paper offers empirical evidence that a country's choice of exchange rate regime can have a significant impact on its medium-term rate of productivity growth. Moreover, the impact depends critically on the country's level of financial development, its degree of market regulation, and its...

We document a decline in the dollar share of international reserves since the turn of the century. This decline reflects active portfolio diversification by central bank reserve managers; it is not a byproduct of changes in exchange rates and interest rates, of reserve accumulation by a small...

The dollar fell by 10 per cent between its March 2020 high and the end of the calendar year, and many banks and forecasters expect it to fall further, by as much as 35 per cent in 2021. Dollar skeptics cite the end of safe-haven flows following the approval of COVID vaccines, the Federal...

After moving slowly downward for the better part of four decades, central bank gold holdings have risen since the Global Financial Crisis. We identify 14 “active diversifiers,” defined as countries that purchased gold and raised its share in total reserves by at least 5 percentage points...

This paper considers the general equilibrium relationship between exchange rates and global imbalances. It emphasizes that the exchange rate is not a primitive but an equilibrium price determined by the policy mix. It uses extensions of the two-country Obstfeld-Rogoff model to analyze the...

What is the relationship between real exchange rate misalignments and economic growth? And what effect, if any, did undervaluations or overvaluations of the lira/euro have on Italy's growth? We address these questions by presenting, first, three main facts: (i) there is a positive relationship...

How did the Subprime Crisis, a problem in a small corner of U.S. financial markets, affect the entire global banking system? To shed light on this question we use principal components analysis to identify common factors in the movement of banks' credit default swap spreads. We find that fortunes...