This paper studies the effects of monetary policy in a small, open economy with a floating exchange rate, sticky wages, and rational expectations in both the asset and labor markets. The model developed emphasizes the link between exchange-rate depreciation and nominal wage inflation, embodying it in an expectations-augmented Phillips curve. The economy studied produces both traded and non-traded goods, and thus provides a framework in which to explore the connection between the dynamic behavior of the exchange rate and the supply structure and degree of openness of the economy. In addition, the paper examines the "vicious circle" hypothesis, showing how an explosive cycle of exchange-rate depreciation and wage-price inflation may arise in response to an expected monetary expansion.

Do global current account imbalances still matter in a world of deep international financial markets where gross two-way financial flows often dwarf the net flows measured in the current account? Contrary to a complete markets or “consenting adults” view of the world, large current account imbalances, while very possibly warranted by fundamentals and welcome, can also signal elevated macroeconomic and financial stresses, as was arguably the case in the mid-2000s. Furthermore, the increasingly big valuation changes in countries’ net international investment positions, while potentially important in risk allocation, cannot be relied upon systematically to offset the changes in national wealth implied by the current account. The same factors that dictate careful attention to global imbalances also imply, however, that data on gross international financial flows and positions are central to any assessment of financial stability risks. The balance sheet mismatches of leveraged entities provide the most direct indicators of potential instability, much more so than do global imbalances, though the imbalances may well be a symptom that deeper financial threats are gathering.

Speculative attacks on a pegged exchange rate must sometimes occur ifasset-price paths are to be free of abnormal profit opportunities. Suchattacks are fully rational, as they reflect the market's response to aregime breakdown that is inevitable. The authors shows that under someexpectations about policy, balance-of-payments crises can also be purely self-fulfilling events. In such cases even a permanently viableregime may collapse, and the economy will possess multiple equilibriacorresponding to different subjective assessments of the probability ofa crisis. The behavior of the domestic interest rate will naturally reflect the possibility of a speculative attack.

This paper examines the effects of ex-change-rate policies when individuals maximize lifetime utility on the basis of rational expectations about the future. The economy studied is one in which the authorities allow free mobility of capital under a crawling-peg exchange-rate regime. Many industrializing economies have adopted a crawling peg as a means of reconciling disparate inflation rates at home and abroad, and some recent efforts to use the rate of crawl as an instrument of anti-inflation policy have attracted considerable interest (see Carlos Diaz Alejandro). Tools similar to those employed here have been applied by Guillermo Calvo (forthcoming) to study this type of exchange-rate management under conditions of capital immobility.

The paper develops a model of exchange-rate and current-account determination for a small economy peopled by infinitely lived, utility-maximizing households. In this setting, a central-bank purchase of foreign exchange has no real effects when central-bank foreign reserves earn interest at the world rate and proceeds are returned to the public. In contrast, an increase in the monetary growth rate does have real effects, even in the long run. The model developed here implies that an increase in government spending may lead to a surplus on current account. The external adjustment process predicted by the model is one in which consumption, real balances, and external assets all rise or fall simultaneously.

When changes in the economic policy regime occur stochastically, asset prices will reflect the possibility of such shifts. In this paper we apply techniques of regulated Brownian motion to obtain closed-form analytic price solutions when policy reaction functions are subject to prospective changes. We focus on the case in which the authorities promise to peg a currency's exchange rate once it reaches a predetermined future level. We also show how an open-ended commitment to exchange-rate targeting may lead to multiple equilibria.

IN AN IMPORTANT recent contribution, Persson, Persson, and Svensson (1987) (hereafter PPS) suggest that through careful restructuring of its nominal and real debt obligations, a government may be able to induce future governments to follow the monetary and fiscal policies that it regards as optimal today. The PPS argument builds on Lucas and Stokey's (1983) demonstration that in a special nonmonetary setting, the time inconsistency of optimal fiscal policy can be avoided through managing the term structure of real government obligations to the public. The basic idea of the PPS scheme for monetary economies is disarmingly intuitive: in addition to continually restructuring nominal and real debt obligations a la Lucas-Stokey, each government must ensure that the next government inherits a stream of nominal claims on the public whose present discounted value equals the stock of money. This equality, PPS argue, removes the incentive for surprise inflation or deflation, because such surprises would not affect the real net worth of the government. This note shows that the PPS prescription for avoiding time inconsistency, appealing as it is, is not generally sufficient. Even under the debt restructuring they recommend, optimal policy is likely to be time inconsistent. The main reason why their scheme fails is that the restrictions it imposes on government asset stocks satisfy first-order but not second-order conditions for an optimum. Because of the complex interactions between the current price level and future interest rates, a government can raise its objective function by moving several variables at once away from the levels planned by the previous government, even though price-level changes alone would not affect government net worth. We develop our argument using the model, notation, and equation numbers of PPS, to which the reader is referred for details. The maximization problem associated with

This paper analyzes aspects of optimal fiscal policy for economies with capital ac cumulation and finitely-lived, heterogeneous agents. For a particular utilitarian social welfare function, the problem faced by a central planner can be broken down into two subproblems: a standard problem o f optimally allocating aggregate consumption over time and a problem of distributing aggregate consumption optimally at each moment among those alive. If it can use a sufficiently rich set of lump-sum taxes and transfers, the government can replicate the command optimum as a market equilibrium outcome. No issue of government debt is needed to achieve this decentralization.