Real exchange rate volatility, financial crises and nominal exchange regimes

This paper examines the sources of real exchange rate (RER) volatility in eighty countries around the world, during the period 1970 to 2011. Our main goal is to explore the role of nominal exchange rate regimes and financial crises in explaining the RER volatility. To that end, we employ two complementary procedures that consist in detecting structural breaks in the RER series and decomposing volatility into its permanent and transitory components. The results confirm that exchange rate volatility does increase with the global financial crises and detect the existence of an inverse relationship between the degree of flexibility in the exchange rate regime and RER volatility using a de facto exchange rate classification.

The cognitive mobilization index: crises and political generations

This article shows how the cognitive mobilization index, designed for use in observing potential political participation, can be used as an indicator of the political climate that a particular society is going through. Following a discussion of the theoretical elaborations (and their working definitions) of the concept of cognitive mobilization, a longitudinal study of various European countries is used to consider the question of how political crises influence cognitive mobilization indexes and what effects they have on the political socialization process among the youngest cohorts.