The real trade weighted value of the dollar fell 11 percent against the Federal Reserve Bank's index of major currencies during the 12 months through May 2011 and 31 percent during the past ten years. Four strong market forces are likely to cause further declines over the next several years: a...

We provide three sets of variance decompositions on microeconomic international relative price data. The first shows that the overall distribution of absolute deviations from the Law of One Price (LOP) is dominated by cross-sectional variation in long-term averages, not by time-series variation...

As the recent Mexican crisis vividly illustrates, Latin American countries often go through boom-bust cycles caused by both domestic policies and external shocks. Such cycles are typically magnified by weak banking systems which intermediate large capital inflows. This paper develops a simple...

The closed and open economy literatures work on evaluating the role of real rigidities, but in parallel. This paper brings the two literatures together. We use international price data and exchange rate shocks to evaluate the importance of real rigidities in price setting. We show that...

A sizeable literature examines exchange rate pass-through to disaggregated import prices but very few micro-studies focus on consumer prices. This paper explores exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices in South Africa during 2002-2007, using a unique data set of highly disaggregated data...

In September 2002, a new market in %u201CEconomic Derivatives%u201D was launched allowing traders to take positions on future values of several macroeconomic data releases. We provide an initial analysis of the prices of these options. We find that market-based measures of expectations are...

In this paper, I give a detailed account of the creation and the evolution of Korea Investment Corporation (KIC) – a sovereign wealth fund established in 2005 by the Korean government. In doing so, I highlight three of its unique features. First, the case of KIC effectively shows the problem...

The failure of uncovered interest rate parity to explain short-term interest rate movements is well documented. We show that short-term changes in long-term interest rates do help to explain short-term exchange rate movements. The relationship gets stronger over our sample period, as the...

We sort currencies into portfolios by countries' consumption growth over the past year. The excess return of the highest-consumption-growth currency portfolio over the portfolio of lowest-consumption-growth currencies is positive on average, compensating investors for large negative returns...

We examine time varying integration of developed (DM) and emerging (EM) market government bonds. Although we find an upward trend for most countries and maturity bands, we do observe reversals and negative trends among both DMs and EMs and for some maturities during the financial crisis. We...