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...