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Working Paper
A dynamic model of export competition, policy coordination and simultaneous currency collapse
This paper offers a game-theoretic interpretation of the recent currency crisis in Asia. Specifically, we argue that the 'price wars during booms' logic of Rotemberg and Saloner (1986) can be used to explain the nearly simultaneous devaluation of several Asian currencies during the summer of 1997. The idea is as follows. Since each of these countries relies heavily on exports to the U.S. pressures for competitive devaluations naturally arise. ; We view the historical tendency of these countries to peg to the dollar as a way to avoid these pressures. However, it must be in the ...
Working Paper
Interpreting the dynamics in U.S. international trade
Journal Article
Model Averaging and Persistent Disagreement
The authors consider the following scenario: Two agents construct models of an endogenous price process. One agent thinks the data are stationary, the other thinks the data are nonstationary. A policymaker combines forecasts from the two models using a recursive Bayesian model averaging procedure. The actual (but unknown) price process depends on the policymaker?s forecasts. The authors find that if the policymaker has complete faith in the stationary model, then beliefs and outcomes converge to the stationary rational expectations equilibrium. However, even a grain of doubt about ...
Working Paper
Testing Present Value Models of the Current Account: A Cautionary Note
Following Campbell (1987) and Campbell and Shiller (1987), many papers have evaluated the intertemporal approach to the current account by testing restrictions on a Vector Autoregression (VAR). The attractiveness of the Campbell-Shiller methodology is that it is thought to be immune to omitted information. This paper uses results from Hansen and Sargent (1991a) and Quah (1990) to show that this is not true in certain (empirically plausible) situations. In particular, it is shown that if fundamentals are driven by unobserved (to the econometrician) permanent and transitory components, then the ...
Working Paper
A Robust Hansen-Sargent Prediction Formula
This paper derives a formula for the optimal forecast of a discounted sum of future values of a random variable. This problem reflects a preference for robustness in the presence of (unstructured) model uncertainty. The paper shows that revisions of a robust forecast are more sensitive to new information, and discusses the relevance of this result to previous findings of excess sensitivity of consumption and asset prices to new information.
Journal Article
New measures of Japanese monetary policy
Working Paper
The role of relative performance in bank closure decisions
This paper studies a competitive banking industry subject to common and idiosyncratic shocks. The induced correlation across bank portfolio returns can be used by a regulator to improve inferences about bank portfolio choices. We compare two types of closure rules: (1) an 'absolute closure rule', which closes banks when their own individual asset/liability ratios fall below a given threshold, and (2) a 'relative closure rule', which closes banks when their asset/liability ratios fall below the industry average by a given amount. ; Two main results emerge from the model. First, a relative ...
Journal Article
Borrowing constraints and asset market dynamics: evidence from the Pacific Basin
This paper estimates a linearized, stochastic version of Kiyotaki and Moore's (1997) credit cycle model, using land price data from Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea. It is shown that the welfare costs of borrowing constraints are positively related to the persistence of (detrended) land price fluctuations. When the residual demand curve for land is inelastic and the steady state share of land held by the constrained sector is less than 30 percent, welfare costs are less than 1 percent GDP in all countries. However, the strained sector becomes more important and as the elasticity of ...
Journal Article
Will inflation targeting work in developing countries?