We use a unique dataset on television prices across European countries and regions to investigate the sources of differences in price levels. Our findings are as follows: (i) Quality is a crucial determinant of price differences. Even in an integrated economic zone as Europe, rich economies tend...

This article summarizes our views on the role of an "aggregation bias" in explaining the PPP Puzzle, in response to the several papers recently written in reaction to our initial contribution. We discuss in particular the criticisms of Imbs, Mumtaz, Ravn and Rey (2002) presented in Chen and...

We show the importance of a dynamic aggregation bias in accounting for the PPP puzzle. We prove that established time series and panel methods substantially exaggerate the persistence of real exchange rates because of heterogeneity in the dynamics of disaggregated relative prices. When...

Since the fall of 2008, option smiles have been clearly asymmetric: out-of-the-money currency options point to large expected exchange rate depreciations (appreciations) for high (low) interest rate currencies, suggesting that disaster risk is priced in currency markets. To study the price of...

We present a new empirical decomposition of the effects of financial liberalization on economic growth and on the incidence of crises. Our empirical estimates show that the direct effect of financial liberalization on growth by far outweighs the indirect effect via a higher propensity to crisis....

This paper offers empirical evidence that real exchange rate volatility can have a significant impact on long-term rate of productivity growth, but the effect depends critically on a country's level of financial development. For countries with relatively low levels of financial development,...

In this paper, we document the fact that countries that have experienced occasional financial crises have, on average, grown faster than countries with stable financial conditions. We measure the incidence of crisis with the skewness of credit growth, and find that it has a robust negative...

How does growing international financial diversification affect firm-level and aggregate labor shares? We study this question using a novel framework of firm labor choice in the face of aggregate risk. The theory implies a cross-section of labor risk premia and labor shares that appear as...