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Working Paper
Monetary Policy and the Currency Denomination of Debt: A Tale of Two Equilibria
Exchange rate policies depend on portfolio choices, and portfolio choices depend on anticipated exchange rate policies. This opens the door to multiple equilibria in policy regimes. We construct a model in which agents optimally choose to denominate their assets and liabilities either in domestic or in foreign currency. The monetary authority optimally chooses to float or to fix the currency, after portfolios have been chosen. We identify conditions under which both fixing and floating are equilibrium policies: if agents expect fixing and arrange their portfolios accordingly, the monetary ...
Working Paper
Bargaining a monetary union
Working Paper
Private investment and sovereign debt negotiations
Working Paper
Financial crises in emerging markets: a canonical model
We present a simple model that can account for the main features of recent financial crises in emerging markets. The international illiquidity of the domestic financial system is at the center of the problem. Illiquid banks are a necessary and a sufficient condition for financial crises to occur. Domestic financial liberalization and capital flows from abroad (especially if short-term) can aggravate the illiquidity of banks and increase their vulnerability to exogenous shocks and shifts in expectations. A bank collapse multiplies the harmful effects of an initial shock, as a credit squeeze ...
Working Paper
Credible monetary policy with long-lived agents: recursive approaches
This paper develops recursive methods that completely characterize all the time-consistent equilibria of a class of models with long-lived agents. This class is large enough to encompass many problems of interest, such as capital-labor taxation and optimal monetary policy. The recursive methods obtained are intuitive and yield useful algorithms to compute the set of all time-consistent equilibria. ; These results are obtained by exploiting two key ideas derived from dynamic programming. The first--developed by Abreu, Pearce, and Stachetti in the context of repeated games and by Spear and ...
Journal Article
Dollarization: a scorecard
In January of this year, Jamil Mahuad, then president of Ecuador, startled his compatriots by proposing to eliminate the national currency, the sucre. Instead, Mahuad advanced, the U.S. dollar would replace the sucre for all purposes. Although a popular uprising forced him out of office a week later, the succeeding government has actually implemented his proposal and recently announced that U.S. dollars will have completely replaced the sucre by September 2000. ; The question remains as to whether the Ecuadorian plan will be successful and, more generally, whether other countries will follow ...
Working Paper
Commitment, coordination failures, and delayed reforms
Working Paper
The Asian liquidity crisis
A country's financial system is internationally illiquid if its potential short-term obligations in foreign currency exceed the amount of foreign currency it can have access to in short notice. This condition may be necessary and sufficient for financial crises and/or exchange rate collapses (Chang and Velasco 1998a, b). In this paper we argue that the 1997-98 crises in Asia were in fact a consequence of international illiquidity. This follows from an analysis of empirical indicators of illiquidity as well as other macroeconomic statistics. We trace the emergence of illiquidity to financial ...
Journal Article
Policy credibility and the design of central banks
In recent years several countries have granted greater independence to their central banks; others have made price stability the only objective of monetary policy. These two trends can be seen as social responses to a fundamental problem of central bank credibility called the time inconsistency of monetary policy. The theory and some empirical aspects of time inconsistency are the subject of this article. ; The theory emphasizes that expected and actual inflation will be larger if a central bank cannot credibly commit to honor commitments to keep inflation low than if it can. To ameliorate ...