Incluye referencias bibliográficas (páginas 141-147) e índice.

Introduction: New data to consider an old question: 1. A brief history of intervention since 1973: The start of the floating-rate era the late 1970s: Talking down, and then rescuing, the dollar , The first reagan administration (1981-84) ; Managing the dollar (1985-91) -- 2. Does a free-floating system work well?: arguments over free-floating exchange rates ; Real effects of exchange rate volatility ; Have exchange rates behaved as they were supposed to? ; Chartists and fundamentalists -- 3. Policy issues: Is an independent policy tool needed? ; How foreign exchange intervention policy is made -- 4. Intervention categorized and defined: sterilized versus nonsterilized intervention ; Implications of current asset supply changes for expectations ; Public versus secret intervention ; Concerted versus unilateral intervention ; Leaning against the wind versus with the wind ; Transactions undertaken by the central bank for customers ; Transactions by other government funds and agencies ; Foreign- and domestic-currency assets sold by other countries ; Other technical issues of definition -- 5. The data on intervention: available, unavailable, and newly available ; Do market participants know when central banks intervene? ; When and why has the us intervened? ; When and why have other major countries intervened? ; The tendency to sterilize ; The scale of intervention ; The relationship between intervention and exchange rates -- 6. Assessing intervention's effectiveness: estimating effects of asset supplies on the exchange rate ; Estimating effects of intervention on the risk premium ; Other approaches ; Estimating how expectations are formed -- 7. Intervention in the 1980s: the results: The effect of news ; Estimation of the risk premium effect ; A quantitative summary of the estimated effects -- 8. Implications for policy -- Appendix. Exchange rate policy news reports, by date and source, 1983-9.