Monetary Unions and Hard Pegs

Volbert Alexander is Professor of Money and Banking at the Economics Department of the University of Giessen (Germany). Prior to his appointment in 1986 he was Professor of Economics at the Universities of Trier and Siegen (Germany). From 1997 to 1999 he served as a Chief Economist and Director of Research at Hypobank in Munich. He is co-founder of a "priority" program, Monetary Macroeconomics, financed by the German Research Foundation. His main fields of interest and his current research are focused on European financial integration, monetary policy issues and problems of short-term reactions in financial markets. Jacques Mélitz is currently Professor of Economics at the University of Strathclyde. Previously, he worked for many years at the Centre de Recherche en Économie et Statistique (CREST), with which he is still affiliated, and was Professor of Economics at the Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris. Since 1983, he has held visiting positions at Harvard and Princeton Universities, has consulted for the OECD, the European Commission, the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of Italy and the Swedish Commission of Monetary Union. He has also been a research fellow of the CEPR since 1986. For the last couple of decades, his research has centered on international macroeconomics, most particularly European issues connected with the European Monetary System and European Monetary Union. George M. von Furstenberg for many years a titled Professor of Economics at Indiana University, is the inaugural holder of the Robert Bendheim Chair in Economic and Financial Policy at Fordham University. Work at the IMF (Division Chief in the Research Department, 1978-83) and at U.S. government agencies such as the President's Council of Economic Advisers (Senior Economist, 1973-76) and the Department of State (1989-90), alternated with his academic pursuits. His latest book projects have dealt with Regulation and Supervision of Financial Institutions in the NAFTA Countries and Learning from the World's Best Central Bankers. He joined the G8 Research Group in 1999 and in 2000 was president of the North American Economics and Finance Association focusing on integration processes in the Western Hemisphere.

Editors:

Volbert Alexander
Jacques Mélitz
George von Furstenberg


Contributors:

Ignazio Angeloni is Deputy Director General for Research in the European Central Bank.

Guillermo A. Calvo is the Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank, Director of the Center for International Economics and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, Research Associate at the NBER, and President-elect of the International Economic Association.

Benjamin J. Cohen is the Louis G. Lancaster Professor of International Political Economy at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Cláudia Costa Storti is an economist at the Banco de Portugal.

James W. Dean has been a professor of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada since he completed his PhD at Harvard in 1973.

Paul De Grauwe is professor of international economics at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and member of the Belgian parliament.

Augusto P. de la Torre is Senior Regional Financial Sector Advisor for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank.

Gerald P. Dwyer Jr. is a Vice President at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, where he is in charge of the finance group in the Research Department.

Edgar L. Feige is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Visiting Research Scholar at the Croatian National Bank and consultant to the International Monetary Fund.

Eduardo Fernández-Arias is the Chief Economist of the Regional Operations Department I of the Inter-American Development Bank (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay).

Hans Genberg is Professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.

Alberto Isgut is Assistant Professor of Economics at Wesleyan University.

Alejandro Izquierdo is senior research economist at the Inter-American Development Bank.

Charles M. Kahn is the Bailey Professor of Finance and Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois.

Eduardo Levy Yeyati holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and is a Professor at the Business School of Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires.

James R. Lothian is Distinguished Professor of Finance in the Schools of Business of Fordham University and Editor of the Journal of International Money and Finance.

Robert A. Mundell. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to Professor Mundell of Columbia University.

Volker Nitsch is a Senior Economist at Bankgesellschaft Berlin, where he covers the European economy and capital markets.

Ugo Panizza is an economist in the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

Guillermo Perry is Chief Economist of the Latin American and Caribbean Region at the World Bank.

Andrew K. Rose is B.T. Rocca Jr. Professor of International Business, Economic Analysis and Policy Group, Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, NBER Research Associate, and CEPR Research Fellow.

Dominick Salvatore is Distinguished Professor of Economics and Department Chairperson at Fordham University in New York.

João A. C. Santos is an economist in the Banking Studies Group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Sergio L. Schmukler is a senior economist in the Macroeconomics and Growth team, Development Research Group, of the World Bank and an associate editor of the Journal of Development Economics.

Luis Servén manages the regional research program of the World Bank's Latin American and Caribbean Region.

Ernesto Stein is Senior Economist in the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank where he has been since 1994.

Ernesto Talvi, a University of Chicago Ph. D., is Executive Director of CERES (Center for Economic and Social Policy Research), a highly respected public-policy research institution in Uruguay, and permanent advisor to the Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Guillermo Calvo.