Search Results
Conference Paper
Purchasing power parity as a monetary standard
Journal Article
Burger survey provides taste of international economics
An annual survey on the price of a hamburger in countries around the globe provides a surprisingly meaty lesson about relative currency valuations.
Working Paper
What determines European real exchange rates?
We study a newly constructed panel data set of relative prices of a large number of consumer goods among 31 European countries. We find that there is a substantial and nondiminishing deviation from PPP at all levels of aggregation, even among euro zone members. However, real exchange rates are very closely tied to relative GDP per capita within Europe, both across countries and over time. This relationship is highly robust at all levels of aggregation. We construct a simple two-sector endowment economy model of real exchange rate determination. Simulating the model using the historical ...
Working Paper
Quantifying the half-life of deviations from PPP: The role of economic priors
The half-life of deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP) plays a central role in the ongoing debate about the ability of macroeconomic models to account for the time series behavior of the real exchange rate. The main contribution of this paper is a general framework in which alternative priors for the half-life of deviations from PPP can be examined. We show how to incorporate formally the prior views of economists about the half-life. In our empirical analysis we provide two examples of such priors. One example is a consensus prior consistent with widely held views among economists ...
Journal Article
How exchange rates are determined
Working Paper
PPP rules, macroeconomic (In)stability and learning
Governments in emerging economies have pursued real exchange rate targeting through Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) rules that link the nominal depreciation rate to either the deviation of the real exchange rate from its long run level or to the difference between the domestic and the foreign CPI-inflation rates. In this paper we disentangle the conditions under which these rules may lead to endogenous fluctuations due to self-fulfilling expectations in a small open economy that faces nominal rigidities. We find that besides the specification of the rule, structural parameters such as the share ...
Journal Article
The influence of real factors on exchange rates
Journal Article
Britain's borrowed time
Journal Article
$ Canadian: an exception
Journal Article
Will China ever become as rich as the U.S.?
Twenty years ago, a visitor to Beijing would have been struck by the bicycle?s popularity as a form of mass transportation. Today, auto congestion and pollution on the increasingly clogged roads of China?s capital city are pervasive features. In a little more than three decades, China has transformed itself from a largely closed agrarian society to an urban exporting nation commonly viewed as the workshop of the world. ; At current growth rates, China will be the world?s largest economy sometime in the next decade. But will it ever be the richest? Though providing a definitive answer is ...