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...

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...

Our goal in this project is to gain a better empirical understanding of the international financial implications of currency movements. To this end, we construct a database of international currency exposures for a large panel of countries over 1990-2004. We show that trade-weighted exchange...

This paper examines the relationship between the exchange rate regime and the pace of current account adjustment. The panel data set we refer to includes 11 catching-up countries from central, eastern and south-eastern Europe between 1994 and 2007. The exchange rate regime is measured by a...

In this paper we present a critical overview of differnt methods of constructing an equilibrium exchange rate. The recent literature on purchasing power parity (PPP) indicates that on its own PPP is not a good vehicle for defining an equilibrium exchange rate. Rather, we argue that the latter...

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...

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...

The paper evaluates current account dynamics in countries with different exchange rate regimes within the EU. In this, the empirical analysis explicitly differentiates between countries with a flexible and a fixed exchange rate regime and members of a monetary union. In addition, we model the...

Since 1991, survey expectations of long-run output growth for the U.S. relative to the rest of the world exhibit a pattern strikingly similar to that of the U.S. current account, and thus also to global imbalances. We show that this finding can to a large extent be rationalized in a two-region...

This paper studies German bank lending during the Asian and Russian crises, using a bank level data set, which has been compiled from credit data at the Deutsche Bundesbank. Our aim is to gain more insight into the pattern of German bank lending during financial crises in emerging markets. We...