The paper examines the Canada–US real exchange rate since the early 1970s to test two popular explanations of the long-run real exchange rate based on the influence of sectoral productivities and commodity prices. The empirical analysis finds that both variables exert a significant long-run...

The relationship between international payments and the real exchange rate - the ‘transfer problem’ - is one of the classic questions in international economics. In this paper we use cross-country data on real exchange rates and a newly constructed data set on countries’ net external...

The paper employs a structural vector auto-regression (SVAR) along the lines of Blanchard and Quah (1989) and Clarida and Gali (1994) to identify the sources of changes in German international price competitiveness over the past 30 years. This leads to a separation of the driving forces of the...

This paper examines mean reversion in real effective exchange rates in six leading Latin American economies during the XXth century using a new data set. A unit-root approach is complemented by an error-correction model including key fundamentals such as terms of trade, trade openness and...

In an influential paper Engel (1999) argues that essentially all the fluctuations in the real exchange rate can be attributed to fluctuations in the relative price of traded goods, and that only a small part of the fluctuations can be attributed to changes in the relative price of non-tradables....

Originally propounded by the 16th-century scholars of the University of Salamanca, the concept of purchasing power parity (PPP) was revived in the interwar period in the context of the debate concerning the appropriate level at which to re-establish international exchange rate parities. Broadly...

Using a new and extensive micro data set we investigate the impact of a change in international competitive pressure on productivity and restructuring. Unlike previous studies we are able to account for the heterogeneity across firms in their exposure to foreign competition. We focus on a...

We analyze the policy trade-offs generated by local currency price stability of imports in economies where upstream producers strategically interact with downstream firms selling the final goods to consumers. We study the effects of staggered price setting at the downstream level on the optimal...

We evaluate the quantitative effects of introducing costs of transporation into an international trade model. We model these costs through the introduction of international transportation services sector. Costs of transportation have substantial long-run effects on welfare and may impact on the...

While substantial empirical research has evaluated the question of whether capital account openness promotes economic growth, this paper finds empirical evidence for cases where the opposite is true--that a policy of capital controls can promote economic growth, when combined with a policy of...