The paper offers comments on Obstfeld and Rogoff (2000). The comments primarily focus on three issues: (a) How do we reconcile the numerical examples of OR, which show quantitatively plausible resolutions to the major puzzles arising from costs of trade, with previous studies that have found...

This paper develops a view of exchange rate policy as a trade-off between the desire to smooth fluctuations in real exchange rates so as to reduce distortions in consumption allocations, and the need to allow flexibility in the nominal exchange rate so as to facilitate terms of trade adjustment....

Newly developed long historical time series on public debt, along with modern data on external debts, allow a deeper analysis of the cycles underlying serial debt and banking crises. The evidence confirms a strong link between banking crises and sovereign default across the economic history of...

This paper estimates and tests an international version of the Capital Asset Pricing Model. Investors from the U.S., Germany and Japan choose a portfolio that includes bonds and equities from each of these countries to maximize a function of the mean and variance of returns. Investors in each...

We investigate the welfare properties of fixed and floating exchange rate regimes in a two-country, dynamic, infinite-horizon model with agents optimizing in an environment of uncertainty created by monetary shocks. The optimal exchange rate regime may depend on whether prices are set in the...

Both empirical evidence and theoretical discussion have long emphasized the impact of %u201Cnews%u201D on exchange rates. In most exchange rate models, the exchange rate acts as an asset price, and as such responds to news about future returns on assets. But the exchange rate also plays a role...

This study measures the proportion of U.S. real exchange rate movements that can be accounted for by movements in the relative prices of non-traded goods. The decomposition is done at all possible horizons that the data allow -- from one month up to thirty years. The accounting is performed with...

Data for OECD countries document: 1. imports and exports are about three times as volatile as GDP; 2. imports and exports are pro-cyclical, and positively correlated with each other; 3. net exports are counter-cyclical. Standard models fail to replicate the behavior of imports and exports,...

There is a rich scholarly literature on sovereign default on external debt. Comparatively little is known about sovereign defaults on domestic debt. Even today, cross-country data on domestic public debt remains curiously exotic, particularly prior to the 1980s. We have filled this gap in the...

The purchasing power parity puzzle relates to the adjustment of real exchange rates. Real exchange rates are extremely volatile, suggesting that temporary shocks emanate from the monetary sector. But the half-life of real exchange rate deviations is extremely large -- 2.5 to 5 years. This...