To investigate how a fixed exchange rate affects monetary policy, this paper classifies countries as pegged or non-pegged and examines whether a pegged country must follow the interest rate changes in the base country. Despite recent research which hints that all countries, not just pegged countries, lack monetary freedom, the evidence shows that pegs follow base country interest rates more than non-pegs. This study uses actual behavior, not declared status, for regime classification; expands the sample including base currencies other than the dollar; examines the impact of capital controls, as well as other control variables; considers the time series properties of the data carefully; and uses cointegration and other levels-relationship analysis to provide additional insights.

The exchange-rate regime is often seen as constrained by the monetary policy trilemma, which imposes a stark tradeoff among exchange stability, monetary independence, and capital market openness. Yet the trilemma has not gone without challenge. Some argue that under the modern float there could be limited monetary autonomy; others, that even under the classical gold standard domestic monetary autonomy was considerable. This paper studies the coherence of international interest rates over more than 130 years. The constraints implied by the trilemma are largely borne out by history. © 2005 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Our goal in this project is to gain a better empirical understanding of the international financial implications of currency movements. To this end, we construct a database of international currency exposures for a large panel of countries over 1990-2004. We show that trade-weighted exchange rate indices are insufficient to understand the financial impact of currency movements. Further, we demonstrate that many developing countries hold short foreign currency positions, leaving them open to negative valuation effects when the domestic currency depreciates. However, we also show that many of these countries have substantially reduced their foreign currency exposure over the last decade. Last, we show that our currency measure has high explanatory power for the valuation term in net foreign asset dynamics: exchange rate valuation shocks are sizeable, not quickly reversed and may entail substantial wealth shocks.