Increasing returns are as fundamental a cause of international trade as comparative advantage, but their role has until recently been neglected because of the problem of modelling market structure. Recently substantial theoretical progress has been made using three different approaches. These...

This paper presents evidence strongly suggesting that the current strength of the dollar reflects myopic behavior by international investors; that is, that part of the dollar's strength can be viewed as a speculative bubble. At some point this bubble will burst, leading to a sharp fall in the...

Conventional analysis of the welfare effects of U.S. oil price regulation in the 1970's focuses on the deadweight losses in the oil market. This paper argues that such analysis substantially understates the benefits from decontrolling prices, because decontrol will lead to an improvement in the...

This paper is an attempt to examine some of the microeconomic foundations of this last view of the link between current accounts and exchange rata. Several authors, especially Kouri and de Macedo (1978), but also more recently Dornbusch (1980), have sought to justify the portfolio approach in...

This paper develops a simple theoretical model of the effect of an oil price increase on exchange rates. The model shows that the direction of this effect depends on a comparison of the direct balance of payments burden of the higher oil price with the indirect balance of payments benefits of...

The postwar expansion of trade among the industrial countries has not had the strong distributional effects which standard models of trade would have led us to expect. This paper develops a model which attempts to explain this observation, while at the same time making sense of some other...

This paper is concerned with the reasons why some currencies, such as the pound sterling and the U.S. dollar, have come to serve as "vehicles" for exchanges of other currencies. It develops a three-country model of payments equilibrium with transaction costs, and shows how one currency can...