We examine the relationship between market structure and the persistence of U.S. dollar-based sectoral real exchange rates for fourteen OECD countries. Our empirical results based on disaggregated data suggest that differences in market structure significantly determine the rates at which...

We examine whether the Chinese exchange rate is misaligned and how Chinese trade flows respond to the exchange rate and to economic activity. We find, first, that the Chinese currency, the renminbi (RMB), is substantially below the value predicted by estimates based upon a cross-country sample,...

We evaluate whether the Renminbi (RMB) is misaligned, relying upon conventional statistical methods of inference. A framework built around the relationship between relative price and relative output levels is used. We find that, once sampling uncertainty and serial correlation are accounted for,...

The linkages between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the other Chinese economies of Hong Kong and Taiwan are assessed, and compared against those with Japan and the US. We first characterize the time series behavior of variables corresponding to three criteria of integration, namely...

The Balassa-Samuelson model, which explains real exchange rate movements in terms of sectoral productivities, rests on two components. First, for a class of technologies including Cobb-Douglas, the model implies that the relative price of nontraded goods in each country should reflect the...

A decade ago the Economist began an annual survey of Big Mac prices as a guide to whether currencies are trading at the right exchange rates. This paper asks how well the hamburger standard has performed. Although average deviations from absolute Big Mac parity are large for several currencies,...

Nominal exchange rates do not move to offset differences in inflation rates on a month to month, quarter to quarter, or even year to year basis, resulting in sizable real exchange rate changes. Are these changes predictable? We address this question in three ways. First, we describe a variety of...

We investigate the strength of the Penn effect in the most recent version of the Penn World Tables (PWTs). We find that the earlier findings of a Penn effect are confirmed, but that there is some evidence for nonlinearity. Developed and developing countries display different types of nonlinear...