The real exchange rate (RER) measures relative price levels across countries, capturing deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP). RER is a key variable in international macroeconomic models as it is central to equilibrium conditions in both goods and asset markets. It is also one of the...

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 propose a dynamic general equilibrium model of exchange rate determination, which simultaneously accounts for all major puzzles associated with nominal and real exchange rates. This includes the Meese-Rogoff disconnect puzzle, the PPP puzzle, the terms-of-trade puzzle, the Backus- Smith...

Financial markets play two roles with implications for the exchange rate: they accommodate risk sharing and act as a source of shocks. In prevailing theories, these roles are seen as mutually exclusive and individually face challenges in explaining exchange rate dynamics. However, we demonstrate...

We use a general open-economy wedge-accounting framework to characterize the set of shocks that can account for major exchange rate puzzles. Focusing on a near-autarky behavior of the economy, we show analytically that all standard macroeconomic shocks -- including productivity, monetary,...

Inflation has risen sharply in many countries since the COVID-19 outbreak. Economists have debated the underlying causes. In this paper, we examine the drivers of the global import price inflation, which peaked at approximately 11 percent a year. We find that a common global component closely...