This article shows that the United States Dollar has been unconstitutional since at least the Civil War. Congresses and central bankers often weaken its value. In a previous article, I demonstrated that the largely valueless Dollar causes human poverty and environmental damage. If Congress...

We study the influence of the exchange rate on the speed of economic recovery in a sample of 67 developed and developing economies over the years 1989-2019. First, using a cross-sectional sample of 341 economic recoveries, we study the effect of nominal depreciation and real undervaluation on...

This paper uses matched bank-firm-level data and the 2014 depreciation of the euro to show that exchange rate depreciations lead to increased bank loan supply of large banks with significant net foreign asset exposure. This increase in lending can be explained by a shift in credit towards both...

We study the macroeconomic effects of internal devaluations undertaken by a periphery of countries belonging to a monetary union. We find that internal devaluations have large and positive output effects in the long run. Through an expectations channel, most of these effects carry over to the...

We study the aggregate and re-distributive effects of currency devaluations in a small open economy heterogeneous households model with leverage-constrained banks. Our framework captures three stylized facts about liability dollarization in emerging economies: i) banks and firms borrow in...

In this paper we derive a new model on exchange rate response to a lasting higher interest rate level. Contemporary models do not provide a convincing explanation for this relationship, but recent research suggests that models based on demand-pull effects to be somewhat confined to small funding...

This paper develops our analytical model to explore the relationship between the dynamics of macroeconomic adjustment and the timing of the implementation of an adjustment program featuring an official devaluation. The effects of postponing adjustment depend on the source of the original shock,...

The study investigates how the depreciation of the Vietnam dong (VND) against the US dollar (USD) affected export turnover and the stock market in Vietnam during the period from 2000 to 2020. A Markov triple regime-switching model is developed for time-series data involving multistructural...

We investigate the long-term effect of domestic currency depreciation on the external debt for a panel of 41 emerging economies over the years 1999-2019. Using heterogenous panel cointegration methods, we find that domestic currency depreciation leads to an increase in external debt to GDP ratio...

This paper studies the consumption response to an increase in the domestic value of foreign currency household debt during a large depreciation. We use detailed consumption survey data that follows households for four years around Hungary's 2008 currency crisis. We find that, relative to similar...

This paper uses matched bank-firm-level data and the 2014 depreciation of the euro to show that exchange rate depreciations lead to increased bank loan supply of large banks with significant net foreign asset exposure. This increase in lending can be explained by a shift in credit towards both...

This paper studies the behavior of inflation after nine large post-1990 contractionary devaluations. A salient feature of the data is that inflation is low relative to the rate of devaluation. We argue that distribution costs and substitution away from imports to lower quality local goods can...

A standard proposition in open-economy macroeconomics is that a central-bank-engineered increase in the real interest rate makes domestic government debt more attractive and leads to a real appreciation. If, however, the increase in the real interest rate also increases the probability of...

We offer an alternative explanation for the fall of Argentina's Convertibility Program based on the country's vulnerability to Sudden Stops in capital flows. Sudden Stops are typically accompanied by a substantial increase in the real exchange rate that breaks havoc in countries that are heavily...

This paper studies the mechanism of international transmission of exchange rate shocks within a 3-country Center-Periphery model, providing a choice-theoretic framework for the policy analysis and empirical assessment of competitive devaluations. If relative prices and terms of trade exhibit...

Large devaluations are generally associated with large declines in real exchange rates. We develop a model which embodies two complementary forces that account for the large declines in the real exchange rate that occur in the aftermath of large devaluations. The first force is sticky...

In this paper an empirical model for analyzing the behavior of nominal interest rates in a semi-open economy is developed. The model explicitly incorporates both the role of open economy factors (i.e., world interest rates, expected rate of devaluation) and domestic monetary conditions in...

Using a sample of 32 developed and developing countries we analyze the empirical characteristics of sudden stops in capital flows and the relevance of balance sheet effects in the likelihood of their materialization. We find that large real exchange rate (RER) fluctuations coming hand in hand...

This paper examines how devaluations affect the relative costs of labor and capital and therefore influence production, profitability, investment, and stock returns for firms in the 'crisis' country as well as competitors in the rest of the world. After developing these ideas in a small,...

I implement two major approaches to identifying the equilibrium exchange rate. First, the concept of purchasing power parity is tested and used to define the equilibrium real exchange rate for the Indonesian rupiah, Korean won, Malaysian ringgit, Philippine peso, Singapore dollar, Taiwanese...

The central hypothesis of this paper is that both the extent and speed of adjustment of the real exchange rate is affected by the way the central bank manages the nominal exchange rate. Specifically, a large discrete adjustment of the nominal exchange rate is more likely to result in fast...

This paper investigates empirically whether there is a negative relationship between a country's risk premium and the balance sheet effect, as implied by recent theories emphasizing financial imperfections. We find evidence that balance sheet effects, stemming from the increase in the external...

A developing country often pegs its exchange rate to a single currency, such as the U.S. dollar, even though it faces a higher inflation rate than the country to which it is pegged. As a consequence, it experiences real exchange-rate misalignments and a series of easily-anticipated devaluations....

Exchange rates and international prices are endogenous – exchange rates influence export prices directly through the costs of intermediate imports, but import price inflation feeds back into the exchange rates indirectly through monetary policy. This paper shows how to quantify the causal...

We revisit the question of what determines the credibility of macroeconomic policies here, of promises to repay public debt. Almost all thinking on the issue has focused on governments' strategic decision to default (or erode the value of outstanding debt via inflation/devaluation). But...

This paper explores the implications of different strategies for financing the fiscal costs of twin crises for inflation and depreciation rates. We use a first-generation type model of speculative attacks which has four key features: (i) the crisis is triggered by prospective deficits; (ii)...

Recently a number of authors have criticized the role of devaluations in traditional stabilization programs. It has been argued that, contrary to the traditional view, devaluations are contractionary, and generate a decline in aggregate output. In spite of the renewed theoretical interest in the...

What happens if a country devalues its currency? Standard macroeconomic theory would argue for expansionary effects, while recent theoretical contributions and the empirical evidence do not appear overly supportive. Devaluations have been mostly used by developing countries, but even...

The three major explanations of inflation include fiscal, monetary, and balance of payments aspects. While in the monetary aspect inflation is considered to be due to an increase in money supply, in the fiscal aspect, budget deficits are the fundamental cause of inflation in countries with...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the dynamic response of a small subset of variables to exchange rate shocks by using a new method based on a set of theory-consistent sign restrictions for the purpose of identifying shocks over time (1995Q1–2019Q1) in the Moroccan economy. It is...

The paper analyses the heterogeneity in the link between macroeconomic fundamentals and exchange rates. For a set of important US-specific economic shocks, it shows that such shocks have exerted a remarkably heterogeneous effect on global exchange rate configurations over the past 25 years....

This paper proposes a new mechanism linking trade and wage inequality in developing countries - the quality-upgrading mechanism - and investigates its empirical implications in panel data on Mexican manufacturing plants. In a model with heterogeneous plants and quality-differentiated goods, only...

Using company-level data, this paper examines the relative stock-market performance of firms with different foreign-exchange exposures around the time of the 1994/95 Mexican crisis. Contrary to what one might have expected given the alleged peso overvaluation, exporting firms outperformed the...

The link between exchange rates and interest rates features prominently in the theoretical and empirical literature on small open economies. This paper revisits this relationship using a simple model that incorporates the role of exchange rate pass-through into domestic prices and distinguishes...

In this paper we argue that the primary force behind the large drop in real exchange rates that occurs after large devaluations is the slow adjustment in the price of nontradable goods and services. Our empirical analysis uses data from five large devaluation episodes: Argentina (2001), Brazil...

The collapse of a fixed exchange rate is typically marked by a sudden balance-of-payments crisis in which"speculators" fleeing from the domestic currency acquire a large portion of the central bank's foreign exchange holdings.Faced with such an attack, the central bank often withdraws...

The cross-country variation in the severity of the crisis was largely determined by three fundamentals: the strength of the banking system, the real appreciation, and the international liquidity of the country. We also find that the rule that links fundamentals to the crisis severity has been...

This paper documents four basic facts about investment goods and investment prices. First, investment has a very significant nontradable component in the form of construction services. Second, distributions services (wholesaling, retailing, and transportation) are much less important for...