This survey discusses theoretical models of speculative attack and currency crises, and reviews the empirical evidence. The paper outlines the correspondence of the models to different cases of crisis (e.g. Latin American crises, the ERM breakdown, and the recent Asian crisis), and points to gaps in the theoretical literature for explaining the Asian crisis. The large economic costs resulting f...

Early warning systems (EWSs) are subject to restrictions that apply to exchange rates in general: fundamentals matter but their influence is small and unstable. Despite this limitation four major lessons emerge: First, EWSs have robust forecasting power and thus help policy-makers to prevent crises. Second, policy-makers must decide about some EWSs' elements, such as the sensitivity of the fore...

We examine the effects of unconventional monetary policy surprises on the value of the dollar using high-frequency intraday data and contrast them with the effects of conventional policy tools. Identifying monetary policy surprises from changes in interest rate future prices in narrow windows around policy announcements, we find that monetary policy surprises since the Federal Reserve lowered i...

There has been serious suspicion of a spurious rejection of the unit roots in panel studies of PPP due to the failure to control for cross-sectional dependence. This article presents evidence of mean-reversion in industrial country real exchange rates in a set up that accounts naturally for cross-sectional dependence, is invariant to the benchmark currency and capable of detecting against regim...

In the nineteenseventies, James Tobin suggested the introduction of a transaction tax on the currency market to cope with exchange rate volatility. We investigate the consequences of the introduction of such a tax on an asset market model from a game-theoretic and an experimental point of view. Our main results include in respect to our model that contrary to the situation in game-theoretic equ...

We provide a comprehensive study of out-of-sample forecasts for the EUR/USD exchange rate based on multivariate macroeconomic models and forecast combinations. We use profit maximization measures based on directional accuracy and trading strategies in addition to standard loss minimization measures. When comparing predictive accuracy and profit measures, data snooping bias free tests are used. ...

Under rational expectations and risk neutrality the linear projection of exchange rate change on the forward premium has a unit coefficient. However, empirical estimates of this coefficient are significantly less than one and often negative. We investigate whether replacing rational expectations by discounted least squares (or “perpetual”) learning can explain the result. We calculate the asymp...

Economists and econometricians very often work with data which has been temporally disaggregated prior to use. Hence, the quality of the disaggregation clearly affects the quality of the analyses. Building on Chow and Lin’s (1971) disaggregation model this paper proposes a new estimation approach and a specification test which assesses the quality of the disaggregation model. An advantage of th...

Sharp exchange rate depreciations in the East Asian crisis countries (Indonesia, Korea, and Thailand) raised doubts about the efficacy of increasing interest rates to defend the currency. Using a standard monetary model of exchange rate determination, this paper shows that tighter monetary policy was in fact associated with an appreciation of the exchange rate in these countries and during the ...

Saving and investment are I(1) processes and generally do not cointegrate. This suggests the need for a nonstationary panel methodology to estimate the long run saving-investment association. We reconsider the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle using a mean group procedure which provides consistent estimates for nonstationary, heterogeneous panels. The resultant slope coe¢cient estimate for 12 OECD econo...