International macroeconomic models long have had difficulty explaining the surprisingly low volatility of the relative price between traded and nontraded goods compared to real exchange rates. This apparent puzzle may reflect a restrictive way of thinking about the nature of nontraded goods....

This paper develops a two-country macro model with endogenous tradability to study features of international economic integration. Recent episodes of integration in Europe and North America suggest some surprising observations: while quantities of trade have increased significantly, especially...

Long-run cross-country price data exhibit a puzzle. Today, richer countries exhibit higher price levels than poorer countries, a stylized fact usually attributed to the Balassa- Samuelson' effect. But looking back fifty years, or more, this effect virtually disappears from the data. What is...

This paper reconciles the persistence of aggregate real exchange rates with the faster adjustment of international relative prices in microeconomic data. Panel estimation of an error correction model using a micro data set uncovers new stylized facts regarding this puzzle. First, adjustment to...

Long half-lives of real exchange rates are often used as evidence against monetary sticky price models. In this study we show how exchange rate regimes alter the long-run dynamics and half-life of the real exchange rate, and we recast the classic defense of such models by Mussa (1986) from an...