We study the distribution of labor income during large devaluations. Across countries, inequality falls after large devaluations within the context of a surge in inflation and a fall and subsequent recovery of real labor income. To better understand inequality dynamics, we use a novel...

By disaggregating price indices, it becomes apparent that the real exchange rate consists of the real exchange rate for a single good and a weighted sum of relative prices between goods. When applying a battery of panel unit root tests to this sum and its components, it is found that both the...

The Balassa-Samuelson effect is usually seen as the prime explanation of the continuous real appreciation of central and east European (CEE) transition countries' currencies against their western counterparts. The response of a small country's real exchange rate to various shocks is derived in a...

Panel unit root tests of real exchange rates – as opposed to univariate tests – usually reject non-stationarity. These tests, however, could be biased if the real exchange rate contained MA roots. Indeed, two independent arguments claim that the real exchange rate, being a sum of a...

We review the literature on multi-horizon currency risk premiums. We show how the multi-horizon implications arise from the classic present-value relationship. We further show how these implications manifest themselves in the interaction between bond and currency risk premiums. This link is...

Korea's real exchange rate has displayed a mild downward trend since the 1980s, with fluctuations of ±20 percent around that trend. This pattern is surprising because the classic Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson framework suggests that countries experiencing rapid growth in the productivity of their...

The establishment of European monetary union (EMU) was widely expected to cause price convergence among member states. In an investigation of this claim, the present study avoids problems of comparability and representativeness by using an extremely detailed and comprehensive scanner database on...

Inflation differentials within European Monetary Union (EMU) are increasingly seen as exerting adverse effects on the price competitiveness of member countries' firms and – given the common monetary policy within EMU – as being detrimental to euro-area economies, in particular to those with...

Empirical evidence suggests that a monetary shock induces the exchange rate to overshoot its long-run level. The estimated magnitude and timing of the overshooting, however, varies across studies. This paper generates delayed overshooting in a new Keynesian model of a small open economy by...

Do "real" assets protect against inflation? Core inflation betas of stocks are negative while energy betas are positive; currencies, commodities, and real estate also mostly hedge against energy inflation but not core. These hedging properties are reflected in the prices of inflation risks: only...