Since the early 1980s, mo ...

This book compares and contrasts flexible versus fixed exchange rate regimes. Beginning with their theoretical justifications, it showcases their observed advantages and disadvantages as they played out in the currency crises of the 1990s and early 2000s across Asia, Europe and Latin America. An analysis of the drivers and implications of these crises singles out fast-paced liberalization and globalization as having played central roles. Moreover it sheds light on some of the factors contributing to the 2008 financial crisis and the key monetary events in its aftermath. An accessible, yet rigorous discussion, supported by extensive evidence, helps readers reach their own conclusions regarding the respective merits of alternative exchange rate systems.

This paper examines the dispersion of beliefs of market participants in the foreign exchange market and their relative role in forming exchange rate expectations. We find distinct variations in the level of dispersion and document that dispersion arises because of a combined effect of market participants holding private information and participants attaching different weights to fundamental, technical, and carry trade analyses. We also document evidence that chartist rules are predominantly used in the shorter spectrum of the forecast horizon and fundamentalist rules are predominantly used in the longer spectrum, and that the importance attached to these rules is adapted through time.