We undertake tests of whether long term data from the U.S. and U.K. are consistent with the intertemporal government budget constraint and the intertemporal external borrowing constraint being satisfied in expected value terms, both individually and simultaneously. An historical perspective is...

By freeing Europe's regional and international trade from tariffs and other trade barriers, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) has often been hailed as a key factor in promoting the post-war economic recovery in Western Europe and in preventing a return to the disaster of the...

The paper studies the effect of the market's perceived exchange rate volatility on bid-ask spreads. The anticipated volatility is extracted from currency options data. An increase in the perceived volatility is found to widen bid-ask spreads. The direction of the effect is consistent with an...

This paper uses an open economy DSGE model to explore how trade openness affects the transmission of domestic shocks. For some calibrations, closed and open economies appear dramatically different, reminiscent of the implications of Mundell-Fleming style models. However, we argue such stark...

This paper provides a reinterpretation of seventeenth-century mercantilist trade doctrine and policy in light of recent theories of strategic trade policy. Mercantilist economic thought, like strategic export-promotion theories, emphasized the use of government policy to capture rents that arise...

This paper characterizes the statistical distribution of the response of the U.S. trade account to a dollar depreciation. To accomplish this task, the paper builds and estimates an econometric model of U.S. bilateral trade. Given an exchange-rate shock, this distribution is generated empirically...

Trade of the OECD countries has grown faster than income during the postwar period. This paper tests a number of different hypotheses for the observed growth in the trade/income ratio. For small open economies, increases in real output and international reserves, as well as declines in tariff...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the factors that contributed to the unprecedented widening of the U.S. external deficit between 1980 and 1986. The paper presents an empirical model of the U.S. current account that is used to assess the relative importance of changes in U.S. price...

This paper develops a simple framework for examining human capital accumulation, unemployment, and relative wages in a global economy. It builds on the models of Davis (1998a, b) of trade between a flexible-wage America and a rigid-wage Europe. To this it adds a model of human capital...

The objective of this paper attempts to reconcile PPP-based views are model-based views about prospects for V.S. external adjustment in the medium term. Projections based on conventional models of the current account do not fully capture ongoing adjustments to exchange rate changes that are...