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Working Paper
Global versus country-specific productivity shocks and the current account
For G-7 countries over the period 1961-1990, there appears to be a strong and stable negative correlation between annual changes in the current account and investment. Here we explore this correlation using a highly tractable empirical model that distinguishes between global and country-specific shocks. This distinction turns out to be quite important empirically, as global shocks account for roughly fifty percent of the overall variance of productivity. An apparent puzzle, however, is that the current account seems to respond by much less than investment to country-specific productivity ...
Working Paper
The mirage of fixed exchange rates
This paper discusses the profound difficulties of maintaining fixed exchange rates in a world of expanding global capital markets. Contrary to popular wisdom, industrialized-country monetary authorities easily have the resources to defend exchange parities against virtually any private speculative attack. But if their commitment to use those resources lacks credibility with markets, the costs to the broader economy of defending an exchange-rate peg can be very high. The dynamic interplay between credibility and commitment is illustrated by the 1992 Swedish and British crises.
Conference Paper
Globalization and global disinflation
Working Paper
Can oil prices forecast exchange rates?
This paper investigates whether oil prices have a reliable and stable out-of-sample relationship with the Canadian/U.S. dollar nominal exchange rate. Despite state-of-the-art methodologies, the authors find little systematic relation between oil prices and the exchange rate at the monthly and quarterly frequencies. In contrast, the main contribution is to show the existence of a very short-term relationship at the daily frequency, which is rather robust and holds no matter whether the authors use contemporaneous (realized) or lagged oil prices in their regression. However, in the latter case ...