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Working Paper
A reassessment of measures of the dollar's effective exchange value
Recent attention has focused on measures of the dollar's effective exchange rate amid disappointment by some observers with the response of the U.S. trade balance to the depreciation of the dollar since February 1985. In particular, these observers suggest that the traditional indexes, which include only currencies of industrial countries, overstate the dollar's decline because it has depreciated much less against the currencies of some key newly industrialized trading partners. ; This paper begins with a description of the uses of effective exchange-rate indexes and describes theoretically ...
Working Paper
Improving the forecast accuracy of provisional data: an application of the Kalman filter to retail sales estimates
If forecasts of economic activity are to rely on preliminary data, the predictable component of the data revisions should be taken into account. This paper applies the Kalman filter to improve the forecast accuracy of published preliminary estimates of retail sales. Successive estimates of retail sales are modeled jointly as a vector autoregressive process, incorporating panel rotation and calendar effects. Estimates of retail sales based on this model are then combined with the raw Census estimates via the Kalman filter. This technique, which may be applied to other bodies of data, yields a ...
Working Paper
Re-assessment of the relationship between real exchange rates and real interest rates: 1974-1990
The general view of the economics profession is that we can not explain exchange rate movements. However, some researchers still contend that the relationship between real interest rates and the real exchange rate is a useful framework for thinking about exchange rate movements. This paper asks whether there is such a systematic relationship and whether it is revealed by the data. In our attempt to find such a relationship we investigate whether the empirical results are conditional on: (1) the time period selected, (2) the choice of interest rate, (3) the measure of expected inflation, and ...
Journal Article
U.S. exchange rate policy: Bretton Woods to present
Working Paper
Comovements in aggregate and relative prices: some evidence on neutrality
This paper develops an alternative test of the neutrality of anticipated monetary policy. A multi-good equilibrium model along the lines of Barro and Hercowitz is used to derive a neutrality proposition for anticipated movements in the aggregate price level and to demonstrate econometrically its equivalence to the exogeneity of relative prices with respect to the aggregate price level. Multivariate causality tests provide a basis for testing these restrictions. The empirical results provide mixed evidence for the equilibrium models, while the variation in the findings across industries ...
Journal Article
Measuring the foreign-exchange value of the dollar