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Journal Article
Financial crisis revives interest in special drawing rights
The financial crisis that began in mid-2007 brought renewed calls for an alternative to the U.S. dollar as the dominant reserve currency in international transactions. Several developing countries suggested greater use of special drawing rights (SDRs). ; SDRs were created in 1969 under the first amendment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Articles of Agreement to supplement member countries' international reserves. Nine years later, the IMF set the long-term objective of making the SDR "the principal reserve asset in the international monetary system." To date, the SDR hasn't ...
Discussion Paper
The global slack hypothesis
We illustrate the analytical content of the global slack hypothesis in the context of a variant of the widely used New Open-Economy Macro model of Clarida, Gal, and Gertler (2002) under the assumptions of both producer currency pricing and local currency pricing. The model predicts that the Phillips curve for domestic CPI inflation will be flatter under most plausible parameterizations, the more important international trade is to the domestic economy. The model also predicts that foreign output gaps will matter for inflation dynamics, along with the domestic output gap. We also show that the ...
Working Paper
Income differences and prices of tradables
This paper presents novel evidence of price discrimination, using prices of identical goods in 28 countries. I explain the observed phenomenon via non-homothetic preferences, in a model of trade with product differentiation and firm productivity heterogeneity. The model brings theory and data closer along a key dimension: it generates positively related prices of tradables and income, while preserving exporter behavior and trade flows of existing frameworks. It further captures observations that richer countries buy more per product and consume more diverse bundles. Quantitatively, the model ...
Working Paper
Understanding the effect of productivity changes on international relative prices: the role of news shocks
The terms of trade and the real exchange rate of the US appreciate when the US labor productivity increases relative to the rest of the world. This finding is at odds with predictions from standard international macroeconomic models. In this paper, we find that incorporating news shocks to total factor productivity (TFP) in an otherwise standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with variable capital utilization can help the model replicate the above empirical finding. Labor productivity increases in our model after a positive news shock to TFP because of an increase in ...
Report
The international diversification puzzle is not as bad as you think
In simple one-good international macro models, the presence of non-diversifiable labor income risk means that country portfolios should be heavily biased toward foreign assets. The fact that the opposite pattern of diversification is observed empirically constitutes the international diversification puzzle. We embed a portfolio choice decision in a frictionless two-country, two-good version of the stochastic growth model. In this environment, which is a workhorse for international business cycle research, we derive a closed-form expression for equilibrium country portfolios. These are biased ...
Working Paper
Estimating elasticities for U.S. trade in services
Explanations of the persistent deficit in U.S. net exports of goods rest on macroeconomic developments and an asymmetry in elasticities: the income elasticity for imports being larger than the income elasticity for exports. Such macroeconomic developments are not applicable to the equally persistent surplus in U.S. net exports of services unless the income elasticities for services exhibit the reversed asymmetry. There have been surprisingly few attempts to demonstrate the existence of this reversed asymmetry, a task that I undertake here. Specifically, I estimate income and price ...