This paper investigates the possibility, raised by Perron (1989, 1990a), that aggregate economic time series can be characterized as being stationary around broken trend lines. Unlike Perron, we treat the break date as unknown a priori. Asymptotic distributions are developed for recursive,...

In this paper we examine temporal properties of eleven natural resource real price series from 1870-1990 by employing a Lagrangian Multiplier unit root test that allows for two endogenously determined structural breaks with and without a quadratic trend. Contrary to previous research, we find...

This paper provides evidence on the unit root hypothesis and long-term growth by allowing for two structural breaks. We reject the unit root hypothesis for three-quarters of the countries approximately 50% more rejections than in models that allow for only one break. While about half of the...

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...

Frictionless, perfectly competitive traded-goods markets justify thinking of purchasing power parity (PPP) as the main driver of exchange rates in the long-run. But differences in the traded/non-traded sectors of economies tend to be persistent and affect movements in local price levels in ways...

Three potential sources of bias present complications for estimating the half-life of purchasing power parity deviations from panel data. They are the bias associated with inapproiate aggregation across heterogeneous coefficients, time aggregation of commodity prices, and downward bias in...

The purpose of this paper was to investigate whether there is a relationship between the degree of wage dispersion in a country and its price level relative to other countries, compared in a common currency. It was found that once a country's real per capita income and deviations of its exchange...

This paper investigates the long- and short-run determinants of the real exchange rate using a panel of data for fourteen OECD countries. The data are analyzed using time series and panel unit root and panel cointegration methods. Two dynamic productivity-based models are used to motivate the...

This paper investigates the determinants of the real exchange rate using a panel of disaggregated data for the OECD countries. It also marries two literatures - one which uses panel data to measure relationships between changes in exchange rates to changes in the determinants, and the other...

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...