Optimal Exchange Rate Policy and Business Cycles*

Implementation and collapse of exchange rate pegging schemes are recurrent events. A currency crisis is often followed by an economic downturn while pegging often begets a boom. In this paper I study why a benevolent central bank should pursue a monetary policy that leads to those recurrent currency crises and subsequent periods of pegging. I show that the optimal policy induces a competitive equilibrium that displays a boom in periods of below average devaluation and a recession in periods of above average devaluation. Therefore, a currency crisis (pegging) can be understood as an optimal policy answer to a recession (boom).