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Most trade is invoiced in very few currencies. Despite this, the Mundell-Fleming benchmark and its variants focus on pricing in the producer’s currency or in local currency. We model instead a ‘dominant currency paradigm’ for small open economies characterized by three features: pricing in a dominant currency; pricing complementarities, and imported input use in production. Under this paradigm: (a) the terms-of-trade is stable; (b) dominant currency exchange rate pass-through into export and import prices is high regardless of destination or origin of goods; (c) exchange rate pass-through of non-dominant currencies is small; (d) expenditure switching occurs mostly via imports, driven by the dollar exchange rate while exports respond weakly, if at all; (e) strengthening of the dominant currency relative to non-dominant ones can negatively impact global trade; (f) optimal monetary policy targets deviations from the law of one price arising from dominant currency fluctuations, in addition to the inflation and output gap. Using data from Colombia we document strong support for the dominant currency paradigm.

''In summary, the book is valuable as a textbook both at the advanced undergraduate level and at the graduate level. It is also very useful for the economist who wants to be brought up-to-date on theoretical and empirical research on exchange rate behaviour.'' ""Journal of International Economics""

Motivated by the existence of time-varying volatility in exchange rates, the paper investigates the effects of exchange rate volatility shocks on a small open economy. First, we use a high-frequency dataset to generate a volatility measure for the period, instead of the traditional moving average standard deviation of exchange rates. The structural VAR impulse responses utilizing the volatility measure yield more significant and robust reactions of real variables to a volatility shock. Consumption, ouput, investment and net export exhibit non-trivial decrease upon impact of the shock. On the contrary, an exchange rate level shock and the traditional volatility measure fail to generate robust impulse responses under different Cholseky orderings. Second, we develop a theoretical model based on a standard New Keynesian small open economy, which can replicate the effects of a volatility shock observed in the VAR result. We solve the model up to a third order approximation so that the solution includes an explicit time-varying volatility term. The model impulse responses exhibit that real variables respond to a volatility shock and they are qualitatively consistent with the VAR result. The underlying mechanism is precautionary saving. The result is sensitive to various parameters such as the openness parameter and the elasticity of inter-temporal substitution. Finally, we make a welfare analysis regarding the optimal monetary policy. Two types of welfare measures are used: the unconditional mean of utility and the conditional welfare. The conditional welfare suggests that policy makers should raise the interest rate when volatility increases. The seemingly counter-intuitive result is due to the fact that the conditional welfare measure reflects dynamic response of the agent throughout her life-cycle. Under the optimal policy suggested by the conditional welfare, the initial consumption adjustment is severe but agents work less and eventually enjoy a higher level of consumption from savings carried over from earlier periods.

Both parts of Volume 44 of Advances in Econometrics pay tribute to Fabio Canova for his major contributions to economics over the last four decades.

This paper presents a rule for foreign exchange interventions (FXI), designed to preserve financial stability in floating exchange rate arrangements. The FXI rule addresses a market failure: the absence of hedging solution for tail exchange rate risk in the market (i.e. high volatility). Market impairment or overshoot of exchange rate between two equilibria could generate high volatility and threaten financial stability due to unhedged exposure to exchange rate risk in the economy. The rule uses the concept of Value at Risk (VaR) to define FXI triggers. While it provides to the market a hedge against tail risk, the rule allows the exchange rate to smoothly adjust to new equilibria. In addition, the rule is budget neutral over the medium term, encourages a prudent risk management in the market, and is more resilient to speculative attacks than other rules, such as fixed-volatility rules. The empirical methodology is backtested on Banco Mexico’s FXIs data between 2008 and 2016.

This paper evaluates how successful is a policy of exchange rate stabilization to counteract the negative effects of a Dutch Disease episode. We consider a small open economy model that incorporates nominal rigidities and a learning-by-doing externality in the tradable sector. The paper shows that leaning against an appreciated exchange rate can prevent an inefficient loss of tradable output but at the cost of generating a misallocation of resources in other sectors of the economy. The paper also finds that welfare is a decreasing function of exchange rate intervention. These results suggest that stabilizing the nominal exchange rate in response to a Dutch Disease episode is highly distortionary.

Using recent advances in the classification of exchange rate regimes, this paper finds no support for the popular bipolar view that countries will tend over time to move to the polar extremes of free float or rigid peg. Rather, intermediate regimes have shown remarkable durability. The analysis suggests that as economies mature, the value of exchange rate flexibility rises. For countries at a relatively early stage of financial development and integration, fixed or relatively rigid regimes appear to offer some anti-inflation credibility gain without compromising growth objectives. As countries develop economically and institutionally, there appear to be considerable benefits to more flexible regimes. For developed countries that are not in a currency union, relatively flexible exchange rate regimes appear to offer higher growth without any cost in credibility.

The NBER Macroeconomics Annual provides a forum for important debates in contemporary macroeconomics and major developments in the theory of macroeconomic analysis and policy that include leading economists from a variety of fields. The papers and accompanying discussions in NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2007 address exchange-rate models; implications of credit market frictions; cyclical budgetary policy and economic growth; the impacts of shocks to government spending on consumption, real wages, and employment; dynamic macroeconomic models; and the role of cyclical entry of new firms and products on the nature of business-cycle fluctuations and on the effects of monetary policy.