Working Paper

Why are business cycles alike across exchange-rate regimes?

Abstract: Since the adoption of flexible exchange rates in the early 1970s, real exchange rates have been much more volatile than they were under Bretton Woods. However, the literature showed that the volatilities of most other macroeconomic variables have not been affected by the change in exchange-rate regime. This poses a puzzle for standard international business cycle models. In this paper, the authors study this puzzle by developing a two-country, two-sector model with nominal rigidities featuring deviations from the law of one price because a fraction of firms set prices in buyers' currencies. The authors show that a model with such building blocks can improve the match between the model and the data across exchange-rate regimes. By partially insulating goods markets across countries and thus mitigating the international expenditure-switching effect, local currency pricing considerably dampens the responses of net exports to shocks hitting the economies therefore helping to account for the puzzle.

Keywords: Foreign exchange rates;

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Part of Series: Working Papers

Publication Date: 2002

Number: 02-11