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Working Paper
Current Account Dynamics under Information Rigidity and Imperfect Capital Mobility
The current account in developed countries is highly persistent and volatile in comparison to output growth. The standard intertemporal current account model with rational expectations (RE) fails to account for the observed current account dynamics together with persistent changes in consumption. The RE model extended with imperfect capital mobility by Shibata and Shintani (1998) can account for persistent changes in consumption, but only at the cost of the explanatory power for the volatility of the current account. This paper replaces RE in the intertemporal current account model with ...
Working Paper
Accounting for persistence and volatility of good-level real exchange rates: the role of sticky information
Volatile and persistent real exchange rates are observed not only in aggregate series but also on the individual good level data. Kehoe and Midrigan (2007) recently showed that, under a standard assumption on nominal price stickiness, empirical frequencies of micro price adjustment cannot replicate the time-series properties of the law-of-one-price deviations. We extend their sticky price model by combining good specific price adjustment with information stickiness in the sense of Mankiw and Reis (2002). Under a reasonable assumption on the money growth process, we show that the model fully ...
Working Paper
Noisy information, distance and law of one price dynamics across US cities
Using US micro price data at the city level, we provide evidence that both the volatility and the persistence of deviations from the law of one price (LOP) are rising in the distance between US cities. A standard, two-city, stochastic equilibrium model with trade costs can predict the relationship between volatility and distance but not between persistence and distance. To account for the latter fact, we augment the standard model with noisy signals about the state of nominal aggregate demand that are asymmetric across cities. We further show that the main predictions of the model continue to ...
Working Paper
Measuring business cycles by saving for a rainy day
We propose a simple saving-based measure of the cyclical component in GDP. The measure is motivated by the prediction that the representative consumer changes savings in response to temporary deviations of income from its stochastic trend, while satisfying a present-value budget constraint. To evaluate our procedure, we employ the bivariate error correction model of Cochrane (1994) to the member countries of the G-7 and Australia. Our estimates reveal, that to a close approximation, the stochastic trend component of GDP is consumption and the transitory component is the error correction term, ...