Executive Summary Currency crises tend to be regional. Since macroeconomic and financial phenomena are not regional, these phenomena are unimportant in understanding why crises spread. But international trade is regional, as countries tend to trade with their neighbors. This suggests that trade links are important in understanding how currency crises spread, above and beyond any macroeconomic p...

The paper compares the credibility of currency boards and (standard) pegs. Abandoning a currency board requires a time-consuming legislative process and an abolition will thus be previously expected. Therefore, a currency board solves the time inconsistency problem of monetary policy. However, policy can react to unexpected shocks only with a time lag, thus the threat of large shocks makes the ...

In this paper, we study predictability of exchange rates and explore determinants of its dynamics over time. We model the admissible amount of predictability in two ways, each corresponding in a stylized manner to a broad class of rational currency pricing models, namely those under which the marginal currency trader can diversify away currency risk and alternative specifications under which th...

Liberalization of foreign exchange regime and instability of national currency are among the major factors that shaped the level and strength of currency substitution in Ukraine. In this paper, a problem of currency substitution is addressed from the point of view of households. It is argued that the most conventional measure of currency substitution, namely the ratio of foreigncurrency denomin...

This paper undertakes an exploratory analysis of the inflationary dynamics within the Croatian economy over the period January 1992 December 1999. Recognizing the structural break in the inflationary process corresponding to the anti-inflationary stabilization program of October 1993, the analysis proceeds by estimating an augmented vector autoregressive (VAR) model of the log first-differences...

This paper investigates whether the Federal Reserve might lower its currency processing costs by reallocating high-speed currency sorting volume among its processing sites. Although scale economy estimates from Bauer, Bohn, and Hancock (1998) suggests that consolidation might permit some processing cost savings, it can be very expensive to ship currency due to security and insurance requirement...

Significant time-varying risk premia exist in the foreign currency futures basis, and these risk premia are meaningfully correlated with common macroeconomic risk factors from equity and bond markets. The stock index dividend yield and the bond default and term spreads in the U.S. markets help forecast the risk premium component of the foreign currency futures basis. The specific source of risk...

We quantify the effects of lending and balance sheet channels on corporate investment during large crises in emerging markets. The depreciated currency creates investment opportunities in the tradable sector but firms might be financially constrained due to: 1) a deterioration of their balance sheet via un-hedged foreign currency debt (balance sheet channel) and 2) a decline in the supply of cr...