Search Results
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
Expected consumption growth from cross-country surveys: implications for assessing international capital markets
Survey data show that the expected growth rates of consumption across countries vary widely and are not highly correlated. This data contradicts the simplest of open-economy models in which there is a freely traded non- state-contingent bond and purchasing power parity holds. We explore two alternative explanations for the finding: that households in each country in effect face different ex ante real interest rates or that there are significant credit constraints, so that expected consumption growth rates are driven largely by expected income growth. The empirical evidence strongly supports ...
Conference Paper
Relative returns on equities in Pacific Basin countries
Working Paper
Regional patterns in the law of one price: the roles of geography vs. currencies
We find evidence that the law of one price (LOOP) holds more nearly for country pairs that are within geographic regions than for country pairs that are not. These findings are established using consumer price data from 23 countries (including data from eight North American cities.) We find that failures of LOOP are closely related to nominal exchange rate variability, suggesting a link to sticky nominal prices. We also find that distance can explain failures of LOOP, suggesting the failures arise from imperfect market integration. However, these two sources do not explain all of the failures ...
Working Paper
Deviations from purchasing power parity: causes and welfare costs
We explore deviations from short-run purchasing power parity across European cities, attempting to move beyond a "first-generation" of papers that document very large border effects. We document two very distinct types of border effects embedded in relative prices. The first is a "real barriers effect," caused by various barriers to market integration. The second is a sticky-consumer-price cum volatile exchange-rate effect. Both are shown to be important empirically, the second type especially so. We argue that the two effects are very different from each other. For the first type of ...
Journal Article
On the record: making sense of today's globalized economy
A discussion with University of Wisconsin economics professor Charles Engel, a senior fellow of the Dallas Fed's Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute, ranges from the current financial crisis to the unpredictability of exchange rates.
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 ...