Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: As the foreign exchange rate market operates twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week it can be described as a global marketplace trading in continuous time. The importance of this market place on weal and woe of economies and agents cannot be overestimated. Long lasting disputes about exchange rate over- and under-evaluation between countries (as most prominently the case between China and the USA) and its implications for international trade, growth rates of economies, unemployment levels, financial money flows, and so forth illustrate this point. As reported by the Bank of International Settlement in its triennial Central Bank Survey 2007, covering 54 countries and jurisdictions, the daily average foreign exchange turnover as of April 2007 has reached a mind-staggering $3.21 trillion. This amount marks an increase of 69 percent compared to the $1.97 trillion three years earlier and highlights the still increasing importance of the exchange rate markets. The U.S. dollar is by far the most important currency as it is involved in 86 percent of all transactions amounting to some $2.7 trillion per day. This is by far bigger than the volume of U.S. international trade in goods and services which for the month April 2007 amounted to (imports + exports) $317.5 billion.1 Indeed, only 17 percent of exchange market turnover has been reported to occur with non-financial customer counterparties, while 43 percent of transactions occur between reporting dealers (i.e. the interbank market) and 40 percent occur between reporting and non-reporting financial institutions (e.g. hedge funds, mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies). Accordingly, more than 2/3 of the turnover was traded as derivatives such as foreign exchange swaps, outright forwards, or options, while only 1/3 constituted spot rate transactions. These are important facts to consider when talking about forces of exchange rate determination. On ground of these figures one may reasonably explain why old-fashion standard models like the monetary model or purchasing power parity may only hold in the very long run and exchange rate movements may be much more subject to trades based on heterogeneous expectations incurred by investors, speculators and market makers. Particularly at the short-run exchange rates exhibit considerably greater volatility than macroeconomic time series leaving an impression of noisy and chaotic behavior. Throughout this work it [...]

We develop a theory-based model of equilibrium exchange rates incorporating factors that have been found to matter empirically. The model provides insights into how variables should be measured and what are appropriate cross-country restrictions. We estimate this model using a panel of 12 industrial countries. The model fits the data relatively well, implying relatively fast adjustment to equilibrium and outperforming a random walk at longer horizons. Furthermore, we find that the rate of adjustment depends on the distance from equilibrium, suggesting that part of the explanation for slow adjustment is inaccurate measures of equilibrium.

"Now, however, weface an Age of Discontinuity in world economy and tech nology. We might succeed in making it an age of great economic growth as weil. But the one thing that is certain so far is that it will be a period of change-in technology and in economic policy, in industry structures and in economic theo ry, in the knowledge needed to govern and manage, and in economic issues. While we have been busy finishing the great nineteenth-century economic ed ijice, the foundations have shifted beneath our feet." Peter F. Drucker, 1968 The A~e Qf DiscQntinuity, p. 10 This project has had a lQng gestatiQn period, probably ultimately dating to a YQuthful QbsessiQn with watershed divides and bQundaries. My awareness Qf the problem Qf discQntinuity in eCQnQmics dates tQ my first enCQunter with the capi tal theQry paradQxes in the late 1960s, the fruits Qf which can be seen in Chapter 8 Qf this book. This awareness led tQ a frostratiQn Qver the apparent lack Qf a mathematics Qf discQntinuity, a lack that was in the process of rapidly being QverCQme at that time.

We analyze coordination of monetary and exchange rate policy in a two-sector model of a small open economy featuring imperfect substitution between domestic and foreign financial assets. Our central finding is that management of the exchange rate greatly enhances the efficacy of inflation targeting. In a flexible exchange rate system, inflation targeting incurs a high risk of indeterminacy where macroeconomic fluctuations can be driven by self-fulfilling expectations. Moreover, small inflation shocks may escalate into much larger increases in inflation ex post. Both problems disappear when the central bank leans heavily against the wind in a managed float.