Kazuko Shirono

TL;DR: In this article, the authors assess the experience of the Common Monetary Area (CMA) based on available empirical evidence over the last two decades and pay particular attention to member countries' adjustment to economic shocks in recent years and the inter-country linkages, including the spillover effects of policies.

TL;DR: The authors found that labor and product market reforms have a lagged but positive impact on employment creation, and the positive effect remains even after controlling for the endogeneity of the decision to reform.

TL;DR: The authors provided estimates of trade and welfare effects of East Asian currency unions, using a micro-founded gravity model, using counterfactual experiments to assess the effects of various hypothetical currency arrangements for East Asia.

TL;DR: The authors examined the role of Japan against that of China in the exchange rate regime in East Asia in light of growing interest in forming a currency union in the region and found that currency unions with China tend to generate higher average welfare gains for East Asian countries than currency union with Japan or the United States.

TL;DR: In this paper, a cost-benefit approach was developed to quantify the optimal level of international reserves in low-income countries, focusing on the role of reserves in preventing and mitigating absorption drops triggered by large external shocks.