These seventeen essays provide an accessible and thorough reference for understanding the role of exchange rates in the international monetary system since 1973, when the rates were allowed to float. The essays analyze such issues as exchange rate movements, exchange risk premia, investor expectations of exchange rates and behavior of exchange rates in different systems. Frankel's sound empirical treatment of exchange rate questions shows that it is possible to produce work that is interesting from a purely intellectual viewpoint while contributing to practical knowledge of the real world of international economics and finance.The essays have been organized in a way that provides an introduction to the field of empirical international finance. Part I documents the steady reduction in barriers to international capital movement and leads logically to part II, which explains how exchange rates are determined. Both monetary and portfolio-based models are surveyed in part II, providing a clear transition to the topic of part III; the possible existence of an exchange risk premium. Part IV applies the tools discussed in earlier sections to explore various policy questions related to exchange rate expectations such as whether foreign exchange intervention matters and whether the European monetary system had become credible by 1991. Each part begins with a detailed introduction explaining not only the central issues of that section but also suggesting connections with other essays in the book.Jeffrey A. Frankel is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Originally published in 1982. This book deals with exchange-rate determination and the implications of floating rate regimes for the time paths of prices and quantities. It develops a class of stochastic equilibrium models of the open economy operating under flexible exchange rates, assuming that agents are endowed with rational expectations but do not possess full current information as to the state of the world. Chapters look at a model’s response to economic disturbances, the effect on non-traded goods, and cyclical variations of the terms of trade. The final chapter considers a model to investigate purchasing parity issues.

This paper re-investigates the implications of monetary policy rules on changes in exchange rate, in a risk-adjusted, uncovered interest parity model with unrestricted parameters, emphasizing the importance of modeling market expectations of monetary policy. I use consensus forecasts as a proxy for market expectations. The analysis on the Deutsche mark, Canadian dollar, Japanese yen, and the British pound relative to the U.S. dollar from 1979 to 2008 shows that, through the expectations of future monetary policy, Taylor rule fundamentals are able to forecast changes in the exchange rate, even over short-term horizons of less than two years. Furthermore, the market expectation formation processes of short-term interest rates change over time and differ across countries, which contributes to the time varying relationship between exchange rates and macroeconomic fundamentals, together with the time varying currency risk premia and exchange rate forecast errors.

This paper presents a brief survey of the empirical literature on survey-based exchange rate expectations. The literature in general supports the presence of a non-zero risk premium and rejects the hypothesis of rational expectations. The crucial result is that, while short-run expectations tend to move away from some long-run “normal” values, long-run expectations tend to regress toward them. If this nature of short-run expectations increases the volatility of exchange rate movements, there may be a basis for some official measure to minimize short-run exchange rate movements.

This paper analyzes the panel data of bi-weekly surveys, conducted by the Japan Center for International Finance, on the yen/dollar exchange rate expectations of forty-four institutions for two years. There are three major findings in this paper. First, market participants are found to be heterogeneous. There are significant "individual effects" in their expectation formation. Second, many institutions are found to violate the rational expectation hypothesis. Third, forecasts with long horizons showed less yen appreciation than those with short horizons. Cross-equation constraints implied by the consistencyof the forecast term structure are strongly rejected in the data.

This book describes and evaluates the literature on exchange rate economics. It provides a wide-ranging survey, with background on the history of international monetary regimes and the institutional characteristics of foreign exchange markets, an overview of the development of conceptual and empirical models of exchange rate behavior, and perspectives on the key issues that policymakers confront in deciding whether, and how, to try to stabilize exchange rates. The treatment of most topics is reasonably compact, with extensive references to the literature for those desiring to pursue individual topics further. The level of exposition is relatively easy to comprehend; the historical and institutional material (part I) and the discussion of policy issues (part III) contain no equations or technical notation, while the chapters on models of exchange rate behavior (part II) are written at a level intelligible to first-year graduate students or advanced undergraduates. The book will enlighten both students and policymakers, and should also serve as a valuable reference for many research economists.