This paper offers an explanation for the persistence observed in real exchange rate movements. The model combines pricing to market behavior with sticky prices generated by staggered contracts. A translog preference structure is sued to enhance both features. The paper finds that openness limits...

This paper attempts to find norms for long-run national price levels,and therefore, by implication, for exchange rates, that are superior to those implied by the absolute or relative versions of purchasing power parity theory. The structural variables we have found to determine these price...

The purpose of this paper is to call attention to the need for a theory of comparative national price levels and to explore some of the elements that seem to belong to such a theory. Most theoretical discussions have maintained that national price levels tend towards equality and focus on...

This paper reconciles the persistence of aggregate real exchange rates with the faster adjustment of international relative prices in microeconomic data. Panel estimation of an error correction model using a micro data set uncovers new stylized facts regarding this puzzle. First, adjustment to...

International macroeconomic models long have had difficulty explaining the surprisingly low volatility of the relative price between traded and nontraded goods compared to real exchange rates. This apparent puzzle may reflect a restrictive way of thinking about the nature of nontraded goods....

The purpose of this paper was to investigate whether there is a relationship between the degree of wage dispersion in a country and its price level relative to other countries, compared in a common currency. It was found that once a country's real per capita income and deviations of its exchange...

This paper examines changes in national price levels and prices of tradables and nontradables and relates them to changes in variables found earlier to be associated with price level differences among countries. Across countries, national price levels increase systematically with the level of a...

While economic theory highlights the usefulness of flexible exchange rates in promoting adjustment in international relative prices, flexible exchange rates also can be a source of destabilizing shocks. We find that when countries joining the euro currency union abandoned their national exchange...

Long half-lives of real exchange rates are often used as evidence against monetary sticky price models. In this study we show how exchange rate regimes alter the long-run dynamics and half-life of the real exchange rate, and we recast the classic defense of such models by Mussa (1986) from an...

While substantial empirical research has evaluated the question of whether capital account openness promotes economic growth, this paper finds empirical evidence for cases where the opposite is true--that a policy of capital controls can promote economic growth, when combined with a policy of...