Search Results
Working Paper
Relative price volatility: what role does the border play?
We reexamine the effect of the U.S.-Canadian border on integration of markets. The paper updates work from our earlier paper, Engel and Rogers (1996). We consider alternative measures of deviations from the law of one price. We pay special attention to the effect of the U.S.-Canada free trade agreement on market integration. Our conclusions are unchanged: markets in the U.S. and Canada are more segmented than can be explained by the physical distance between the two locations. Formal trade barriers do not appear to explain much of that segmentation.
Working Paper
Intra-national, intra-continental, and intra-planetary PPP
This paper presents a general framework to address several issues that have arisen in recent work that investigates purchasing power parity (PPP) and other inter-regional relative price movements: (1) How can we model real exchange rate movements in a consistent manner, so that our model for the real exchange rate for country B relative to country C is commensurate with our models for country A/ country B and country A/ country C real exchange rates? For example, can things be modeled so that our tests do not depend on the "base country"? (2) How should we handle correlation across real ...
Working Paper
How wide is the border?
Previous tests of stock index arbitrage models have rejected the no-arbitrage constraint imposed by these models. This paper provides a detailed analysis of actual S&P 500 arbitrage trades and directly relates these trades to the predictions of index arbitrage models. An analysis of arbitrage trades suggests that (i) short sale rules are unlikely to restrict arbitrage, (ii) the opportunity cost of arbitrage funds exceeds the Treasury Bill rate, and (iii) the average price discrepancy captured by arbitrage trades is small. Tests of the models provide some support for a version of the arbitrage ...
Conference Paper
The U.S. current account deficit and the expected share of world output
We investigate the possibility that the large current account deficits of the U.S. are the outcome of optimizing behavior. We develop a simple long-run world equilibrium model in which the current account is determined by the expected discounted present value of its future share of world GDP relative to its current share of world GDP. The model suggests that under some reasonable assumptions about future U.S. GDP growth relative to the rest of the advanced countries ? more modest than the growth over the past 20 years ? the current account deficit is near optimal levels. We then explore the ...
Discussion Paper
Exchange rate policies
Modern macroeconomic theory teaches us new lessons about exchange rates: Currency depreciations or appreciations that change the relative competitiveness of producers in different countries are undesirable from a global perspective if they lead to relative prices that do not reflect the true relative costs of production. From this standpoint, "external balance" does not mean that trade balances should be zero, but rather that global resources are allocated efficiently. The implications of this insight for the role of the exchange rate in monetary policy are explored here. Some of the ...
Working Paper
Why is the forward exchange rate forecast biased? A survey of recent evidence
Forward exchange rate unbiasedness is rejected in tests from the current floating exchange rate era. This paper surveys advances in this area since the publication of Hodrick's (1987) survey. It documents that the change in the future exchange rate is generally negatively related to the forward premium. Properties of the expected forward forecast error are reviewed. Issues such as the relation of uncovered interest parity to real interest parity, and the implications of uncovered interest parity for cointegration of various quantities are discussed. The modeling and testing for risk premiums ...