This paper compares an Australia-New Zealand currency union to a purely floating exchange rate regime in the context of a structural, two-country open economy model. Micro-foundations support policy assessment by facilitating direct calculation of household welfare. Analysis focuses on changing business cycle volatilities; the role of risk is not considered. At benchmark calibration currency un...

EU enlargement revives the debate around the participation to the EMU. We use a gravity model to see whether informal barriers have changed over a ten-year period covering the creation of the EMU, and whether their impact on European member countries’ agricultural and food trade has been modified. We find that it has led to lower information costs. We observe a diminishing marginal trade impact...

The profitability of chartist trading rules on foreign exchange markets is still under debate. Since simple technical trading rules may not adequately capture the complex phenomenon of chartist trading, this paper focuses on the prominent head-and-shoulder pattern as a representative trading rule which incorporates various „technical“ ideas such as smoothed trends, trend reversal, resistance le...

This paper asks why Argentina slipped into a deep crisis with its currency board (CB) arrangement though this regime had received so much academic support as a stabilisation device. It is argued that a CB does not make devaluation risks disappear but translates them into an explosive, strongly pro-cyclical mixture of exchange rate, financial system and default risk which might trap a country in...

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...

This paper is interested in linking formally external disequilibriums to the sovereign debt crisis the EMU is experiencing since 2009. Relying on the CHEER approach that connects the goods market to the capital market, we show that when a country belonging to a monetary union faces external disequilibrium relative to its main partner, the corresponding interest rate differential increases. More...

The paper examines the interrelationship between fiscal and monetary policy in a two-country monetary union. The worst scenario occurs when an independent central bank (CB) sets the nominal interest rate and responds to rising government debt/GDP ratios by monetisation. The result is high inflation, high debt/GDP ratios and a large public sector. Government debt and inflation are contained if t...

This paper is a pioneering attempt to include India with east and Southeast Asia to study the existence of the economic criteria for a common currency. The analysis in this paper shows that significant complementarities in trade exist among these countries, most of them experience similar shocks and labor mobility is already present. These results point to the fact that the cost of adopting a s...

The hoped-for silver lining of euro-area austerity programs was to raise external competitiveness and improve current accounts. Using product- industry-level data for 12 countries over the period 1999–2018, we show that reductions in government spending reduce prices wages but only products with low import content industries export shares. This leads asymmetric expenditure switching, net export...

Reuters news reports have become an accepted tool for empirical studies analyzing informational asymmetries in FX markets. This paper tests the accuracy of the Reuters reports for Swiss interventions in the foreign exchange market. The evidence finds that the time stamp of the Reuters reports does not always lie near the recorded time of the first intervention trade as is commonly assumed in ma...