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Journal Article
ECU, who?
Journal Article
Exchange rate regimes and volatility
Journal Article
The launch of the euro
The introduction on January 1, 1999, of the euro--the single currency adopted by eleven of the fifteen countries of the European Union--marked the beginning of the final stage of Economic and Monetary Union and the start of a new era in Europe. The creation of a single currency and a single monetary policy has provided both extraordinary challenges and exceptional opportunities within Europe. This article reviews the organization, objectives, and targets of the euro area's new central bank and discusses some of the early challenges it has faced in setting and implementing monetary policy with ...
Working Paper
Monetary and financial integration in the EMU: Push or pull?
A number of studies have recently noted that monetary integration in the European Monetary Union (EMU) has been accompanied by increased financial integration. This paper examines the channels through which monetary union increased financial integration, using international panel data on bilateral international commercial bank claims from 1998-2006. I decompose the relative increase in bilateral commercial bank claims among union members following monetary integration into three possible channels: A "borrower effect," as a country's EMU membership may leave its borrowers more creditworthy ...
Report
Europe and the Maastricht challenge
The uncertainty caused by the exchange rate crises of 1992-93 led to two questions: Is monetary union still feasible? What strategies are best for achieving convergence according to the Maastricht criteria? This article addresses these questions by examining the progress made by the five major European Union countries in satisfying the Maastricht criteria and the two crucial impediments facing these countries--disparities in real exchange rate convergence and fiscal imbalances--and alternative strategies to deal with these impediments. Overall, our analysis suggests that the prospects for ...
Report
Using option prices to estimate realignment probabilities in the European Monetary System
Risk reversals are a combination of options from which price information about market expectations of future exchange rates can be extracted. This paper describes a procedure for estimating the market's perceived probability distribution of future exchange rates from the prices of risk reversals and other currency options. This procedure is used to estimate the ex ante probability of a realignment of the French franc and pound sterling. The procedure for estimating the realignment probabilities relies on the jump-diffusion model of exchange rate behavior and the resulting option pricing ...
Journal Article
Will a common European monetary policy have asymmetric effects?
This article reviews the evidence on differences in the transmission of monetary policy across European countries. The authors argue that the existing evidence, based almost exclusively on macroeconomic data, does not allow one to decide whether a common monetary policy will have asymmetric effects. A first peek at microeconomic data suggests this may be a promising route for further work.
Working Paper
Target zones and conditional volatility: the role of realignments
This paper examines the relationship between the conditional volatility of target zone exchange rates and realignments of the system. To investigate this question, modified jump diffusion Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) and absolute value GARCH models are fit to six exchange rates of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) of the European Monetary System (EMS). Time-varying jump probability and absolute value GARCH models are effective in improving the fit of jump-diffusion models on target zone data. There is some evidence that conditional volatility is higher ...
Report
European integration and asymmetry in the EMS
The empirical literature offers conflicting views of German dominance in the European Monetary System. We examine the validity of the German dominance hypothesis (GDH) by analyzing the responses of the European central banks and the money markets to monetary innovations originating both in Europe (European asymmetry) and abroad (international asymmetry). Our results reconcile the conflicting views in the literature. The GDH is confirmed when the analysis is conducted with intervention rates before the German unification. Results support European asymmetry with short rates before 1990 but not ...
Journal Article
Lessons from the European Monetary System
A description of the exchange-rate mechanism of the European Monetary System and a discussion of some problems with the mechanism that apply to the operation of any target-zone system for maintaining exchange rates.