The paper develops a theory that endogenizes the currency composition of international nominal bond portfolios in general equilibrium. It emphasizes the critical roles of government debt and of government policies, and thereby reconnects to the partial equilibrium portfolio balance literature of the 1980s. Consistent with recent empirical findings, optimal private sector foreign currency positi...

In this paper we examine currency areas and monetary policy coordination in a two-country model where the value of each country’s currency is determined endogenously. Exchanges in the goods markets are modelled as random bilateral matches, and households choose the amount and the frequency of purchases made in each currency area. By contrast, the currency market is centralized and Walrasian. We...

A BSTRACT According to the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek theorem, the net exports of a region are determined by relative abundance of the immobile factors of production. Empirical tests of this theory, usually at a high level of aggregation, have frequently not supported it. We find, instead, that data on interstate trade in wood products within the United States are in strong agreement with the theore...

4 Non-technical summary 5 7 2 10 2.1 Sectors and aggregation 10 2.2 Relative prices 11 2.3 Real exchange rate and sectoral productivity shocks 12 2.4 Nominal rigidity and aggregate supply 14 3 Autonomous monetary policy 15 4 The currency union 17 4.1 Determination of union-wide output and prices 18 4.2 Currency union’s welfare 19 4.3 Reference member state’s welfare 20 5 Relative performance an...

We use a panel of annual data for over one hundred developing countries from 1971 through 1992 to characterize currency crashes. We define a currency crash as a large change of the nominal exchange rate that is also a substantial increase in the rate of change of nominal depreciation. We examine the composition of the debt as well as its level, and a variety of other macroeconomic factors, exte...

Convertibility is an important factor in international trade where instruments valued in different currencies will be exchanged. Convertibility can be either total manner or a partial manner. However, whatever the type of convertibility, there will be advantages and disadvantages to  the economy of a country of which has  made a convertibility of its national currency. Convertibility was studie...

How does an unexpected domestic monetary expansion a¤ect the foreign economy: Does it induce an increase or a decline in foreign production? And is it ’beggar-thy-neighbour’, or does it raise foreign welfare? Empirical evidence from VARs indicates that monetary policy has positive international transmission e¤ects on both foreign output and aggregate demand. A two-country dynamic general equili...

Commodity currency literature recently stressed the importance of commodity prices as a determinant of real exchange rates in developing countries (Cashin, Cespedes and Sahay 2004). We provide new empirical evidence on this issue by focusing on countries which are specialized in the ex-port of one leading commodity. For those countries, we investigate to which extent their real exchange rate is...