Search Results
Technological Innovations and Global Trade of Services
Technological innovations may give the U.S. a significant advantage in the global trade of services, which could potentially help the U.S. close its trade deficit.
Working Paper
Equilibrium Sovereign Default with Exchange Rate Depreciation
This study proposes and quantitatively assesses a terms-of-trade penalty for defaulting: defaulters must exchange more of their own goods for imports, which causes an adjustment to the equilibrium exchange rate. This penalty can take the place of an ad hoc fall in output: Facing only this penalty and temporary exclusion from debt markets, countries are willing to maintain borrowing obligations up to a realistic level of debt. The terms-of-trade penalty is consistent with the observed relationship between sovereign default and a country's trade flows and prices. The defaulter's currency ...
Trade and U.S. Gold Reserves during the Classical Gold Standard Era
During the period from around 1870 to the outbreak of World War I, changes in a nation’s gold reserves were closely linked to changes in its trade balances.
Journal Article
Will Tech Improvements for Trading Services Switch the U.S. into a Net Exporter?
Innovations gave the U.S. a trade advantage in goods many years ago. Can innovations do the same for trade in services for the U.S.?
Discussion Paper
Recycling Oil Revenue
Almost half the U.S. merchandise trade deficit was tied to petroleum ten years ago. Oil prices were above $100 a barrel, the economy was doing well enough that oil consumption was growing despite high oil prices, and domestic oil production was falling. The U.S. petroleum trade balance has since narrowed substantially from $400 billion in 2008 to under $65 billion in 2017 as a result of lower oil prices, higher domestic production, and a prolonged period of flat-to-falling petroleum consumption. Going forward, the changes in domestic production and consumption have significantly moderated the ...
Working Paper
Exchange Rate Disconnect and the Trade Balance
We propose a model with costly international financial intermediation that links exchange rate movements to shifts in the demand for domestically produced goods relative to the demand for imported goods (trade rebalancing). Our model is consistent with stylized facts of exchange rate dynamics, including those related to the trade balance, which is typically overlooked in the literature on exchange rate determination. In a quantitative assessment, trade rebalancing explains nearly 50 percent of exchange rate fluctuations over the business cycle, whereas exogenous deviations from the uncovered ...
Shifts in U.S. Trade Balance and Industrialization
As the U.S. has industrialized, changes in comparative advantage relative to those of other nations have led to periods of persistent trade surpluses and deficits.
Early U.S. Trade Deficits and Industrialization
Trade deficits during the country’s first phase of industrialization did not inhibit U.S. development and may have facilitated industrialization.
Working Paper
The Adjustment of Global External Imbalances: Does Partial Exchange Rate Pass-Through to Trade Prices Matter?
This paper assesses whether partial exchange rate pass-through to trade prices has important implications for the prospective adjustment of global external imbalances. To address this question, we develop an open-economy DGE model in which firms set their prices with an eye toward maintaining their competitiveness against other producers; this feature of the model generates a variable desired markup and, hence, pass-through that is less than complete. With trade price elasticities of unity or greater, we find that for a given move in the exchange rate the nominal trade balance adjusts more ...
The Role of Innovations in Global Trade: The Shipping Container
A simple trade innovation—the use of shipping containers—may have contributed to the rapid expansion of global trade over the past 50 years.