Search Results
Working Paper
Why hasn't trade grown faster than income? Inter-industry trade over the past century
Over the past century, the ratio of international trade to GDP has not grown substantially for most major OECD economies. We conjecture that growth in intra-industry trade has been offset by a decline in intra-industry trade. Inter-industry trade may have declined either because of biased growth in factor inputs so that factor proportions have become more similar, or because preferences have become more similar with rising per capita income.
Working Paper
Exchange rate instability: determinants and predictability
The paper is concerned with exchange rate instability, by which we mean large changes in exchange rates. The paper has two objectives. First, we search for plausible determinants of currency crashes. To do this we examine annual panel data for a large sample of developing countries. The work is non-structural, taking the form of probit regressions which link currency crashes to a variety of candidate causes. We examine a comprehensive set of both foreign and domestic explanatory variables. The list includes: foreign conditions; the vulnerability of the country to a crash; the level of ...
Journal Article
Are exchange rates macroeconomic phenomena?
This paper argues that macroeconomic variables are relatively unimportant determinants of exchange rates. The argument hinges on the fact that bilateral exchange rate volatility differs widely across pairs of countries, but macroeconomic volatility is much more similar across countries, at least at short- and medium-term frequencies. For instance, the French Franc/German Deutschemark exchange rate has dramatically lower volatility than the Canadian dollar/German Deutschemark rate, although France and Canada have approximately equal macroeconomic volatility vis-a-vis Germany.
Conference Paper
Exchange rate instability: determinants and predictability
Journal Article
Do local bond markets help fight inflation?
Domestic bond markets allow governments to inflate away their debt obligations. However, they also may create a group of bond holders with the influence and desire to demand lower stable inflation. These competing interests suggest the net impact of creating a local currency bond market on inflation is ambiguous. Recent research finds that the creation of such markets in countries with an inflation target does reduce inflation: Countries with bond markets experience inflation approximately 3 percentage points lower than those without.
Working Paper
Contagion and trade: why are currency crises regional?
Currency crises tend to be regional; they affect countries in geographic proximity. This suggests that patterns of international trade are important in understanding how currency crises spread, above and beyond and macroeconomic phenomena. We provide empirical support for this hypothesis. Using data for five different currency crises (in 1971, 1973, 1992, 1994, and 1997) we show that currency crises affect clusters of countries tied together by international trade. By way of contrast, macroeconomic and financial influences are not closely associated with the cross-country incidence of ...
Working Paper
Speculative attacks on pegged exchange rates: an empirical exploration with special reference to the European Monetary System
This paper presents an empirical analysis of speculative attacks on pegged exchange rates in 22 countries between 1967 and 1992. We define speculative attacks or crises as large movements in exchange rates, interest rates, and international reserves. We develop stylized facts concerning the univariate behavior of a variety of macroeconomic variables, comparing crises with periods of tranquility. For ERM observations we cannot reject the null hypothesis that there are few significant differences in the behavior of key macroeconomic variables between crises and non-crisis periods. This null ...
Journal Article
Do currency unions increase trade? A \\"gravity\\" approach
Working Paper
The Olympic effect
Economists are skeptical about the economic benefits of hosting "mega-events" such as the Olympic Games or the World Cup, since such activities have considerable cost and seem to yield few tangible benefits. These doubts are rarely shared by policymakers and the population, who are typically quite enthusiastic about such spectacles. In this paper, we reconcile these positions by examining the economic impact of hosting mega-events like the Olympics; we focus on trade. Using a variety of trade models, we show that hosting a mega-event like the Olympics has a positive impact on national ...
Journal Article
Are all devaluations alike?