This paper shows that globalization of securities markets exacerbates the volatility of capital flows by strengthening incentives for herding behavior. This is a prediction of a mean-variance portfolio optimization model with imperfect information, in which investors acquire country-specific...

A well-known puzzle in the international finance literature is that a random walk predicts exchange rates better than economic models (Meese and Rogoff, 1983a, b and 1988). This paper offers a potential explanation for this finding. When exchange rates and fundamentals are highly persistent,...

Many rational expectations models state that an economic variable is determined as the present value of future variables. These restrictions have traditionally been tested on VARs where variables appear either in levels (or cointegrating relationships) or first differences. Commonly used test...

Variance decompositions of the Mexico-United States real exchange rate are examined using monthly data on consumer prices and the nominal exchange rate for the period January, 1969 to February, 2000. The results show that the robust result found in industrial-country data that most of the...

According to the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) theory, real exchange rate fluctuations are mainly caused by transitory shocks. The theory fits well one empirical feature of the data, namely the short-run volatility of real exchange rates, but also implies that shocks should die away in one to...

This paper examines the major interest groups in the debate over allowing the wholesale re-importation of prescription drugs through the Pharmaceutical Market Access Act. By making use of the logit model, we see the effects that each of these groups has had on the voting behavior of the 108 th...