Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

The optimal escape from a liquidity trap involves generating private-sector expectations of a higher future price level and higher future inflation. This lowers the real interest rate and reduces the recession during the liquidity trap. The problem, emphasized by Krugman, is that central-bank...

We make the first attempt in the literature to empirically examine the spillover effects of U.S. monetary policy on trade in other countries. In a large sector-level bilateral trade dataset of 137 countries for the years 1970-2000, we find strong and robust evidence supporting an international...

Before the crisis of 1997-98, the East Asian economies ¡X except for Japan but including China ¡X pegged their currencies to the U.S. dollar. To avoid further turmoil, the IMF now argues that these currencies should float more freely. However, our econometric estimations show that the...

We develop a general equilibrium monetary model of endogenous specialization and international trade to examine the degree of specialization and trade volume under alternative exchange rate regimes. Where demand shocks are important, we demonstrate an increase in specialization, trade and...

The withdrawal of foreign capital from emerging countries at the height of the recent financial crisis and its quick return sparked a debate about the impact of capital flow surges on asset markets. This paper addresses the response of property prices to an inflow of foreign capital. For that...

The sharp increase in both gross and net capital flows over the past two decades has led to a renewed interest in their determinants. Most existing theories of international capital flows are in the context of models with only one asset, which only have implications for net capital flows, not...

We study the classic transfer problem of predicting the effects of an international transfer on the terms of trade and the current account. A two-country model with debt and capital allows for realistic features of historical transfers: they follow wartime increases in government spending and...

Estimates of the elasticity of substitution between domestic and foreign varieties are small in macroeconomic data, but substantially larger in disaggregated microeconomic studies. This may be an artifact of heterogeneity. We use disaggregated multilateral trade data to structurally identify...

The relationship between asset prices and fundamentals is characterized by both disconnect and predictability: asset prices are largely disconnected from current publicly observed fundamentals and at the same time contain information about future fundamentals, even when conditioning on current...