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 a non-stationary job search model we allow unemployed workers to have a permanent option to leave the labour force. Transitions into nonparticipation occur when reservation wages drop below the utility of being nonparticipant. Taking account of these transitions allows the identification of...

The impact of fiscal stimulus depends not only on short-term tax and spending policies, but also on expectations about offsetting measures in the future. This paper analyzes the effects of an increase in government spending under a plausible debt-stabilizing policy that systematically reduces...

Kocherlakota and Pistaferri (EJ, 2007) [KP] develop a model of a world economy with private-information Pareto optimal (PIPO) risk sharing; in that model, the real exchange rate tracks relative domestic/foreign cross-sectional distributions of consumption. KP claim that the PIPO model fits the...

This Paper reviews the controversy over China’s exchange rate regime. Placing the issue in the context of the literature on exit strategies, it argues that now is the best time for China to exit from its peg. Moving to a managed float would be in the country’s own interest; it would help the...

We propose a new explanation for the forward-premium and the delayed-overshooting puzzles. Both puzzles arise from a systematic under-reaction of short-term interest rate forecasts to current innovations. Accordingly, the forward premium is always a biased predictor of future depreciation; the...

A natural experiment with an exchange-rate band in Austria-Hungary in the early 20th century provides a rare opportunity to discuss critical aspects of the theory of target zones. Providing a new derivation of the target zone model as a set of nested hypotheses, the inference is drawn that...

Both empirical evidence and theoretical discussion have long emphasized the impact of `news' 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 in...

This paper analyses the properties of multivariate tests of purchasing power parity (PPP) that fail to take heterogeneity in the speed of mean reversion across real exchange rates into account. We compare the performance of homogeneous and heterogeneous unit root testing methodologies. The...

This paper analyzes the sources of the differential beliefs of market participants in the foreign exchange market and their relative role in forming exchange rate expectations. We find that there are distinct periods of high and low dispersion and document that dispersion arises because of a...