In this paper we use an exchange rate model that combines asset market characteristics with balance of payments interactions to examine the nominal effective exchange rates of the German mark, Japanese yen, and U.S. dollar for the recent experience with floating exchange rates. Our approach may be interpreted as one which attempts to flesh out the missing links that arise in conditioning an exchange rate solely on relative prices, as occurs in a standard PPP analysis. In contrast to much other empirical exchange rate modeling, our approach explicitly involves the use of a current account sustainability term. Amongst the findings reported in this paper are: significant, and sensible, long-run relationships for all of the currencies studied; appealing short-run dynamics for two of the currencies; and a finding that the Japanese effective exchange rate closely tracks the long-run exchange rate defined in this paper.

This paperback edition consists of the first three parts of Allen and Kenen's major book, Asset Markets, Exchange Rates, and Economic Integration. These three parts stand alone, as the authors intended and as reviewers have commented. In parts four and five of that volume they extend their model to two countries trading with the outside world and analyze questions of economic integration. The authors synthesize and extend recent developments in international monetary theory using a general model of an open economy that trades goods and assets with the outside world. The model embodies the asset market or portfolio approach to analyzing balance-of-payments adjustment. Exchange rates are determined in the short run by conditions in the asset markets and in the long run by conditions in the goods markets. The goods markets include an export good, and import good, and a nontradeable good. Allen and Kenen show that different assumptions about the substitutability between goods or between assets can generate several popular models as special cases of their own.

Norman Miller provides a fresh perspective on balance of payments and exchange rate theories, including intertemporal open economy models that focus on the optimum current account. To this end, he proves that any non-zero balance of payments must always be associated with a disequilibrium in either a commodity or an asset market. In this rigorous yet readable book, important welfare and policy implications are carefully examined. Norman Miller develops a new theory of the balance of payments associated with commodity market disequilibrium, a loanable funds theory of exchange rate and a modern foreign exchange market theory of the exchange rate that incorporates capital flows.