Federico Sturzenegger

Most of the empirical literature on exchange rate regimes uses the IMF de jure classification based on the regime announced by the governments, despite the recognized inconsistencies between reported and actual policies in many cases. To address this problem, we construct a de facto classification based on data on exchange rates and international reserves from all IMF-reporting countries over the period 1974-2000, which we believe provides a meaningful alternative for future empirical work on the topic. The classification sheds new light on several stylized facts previously reported in the literature. In particular, we find that the de facto pegs have remained stable throughout the last decade, although an increasing number of them shy away from an explicit commitment to a fixed regime, a phenomenon we call "fear of pegging." We confirm the hollowing out hypothesis and show that, as expected, it does not apply to countries with limited access to capital markets. We also fi...

In this book, Federico Sturzenegger and Mariano Tommasi propose formal models to answer some of the questions raised by the recent reform experience of many Latin American and East European countries. They apply common standards of analytical rigor ...