This paper examines the importance of productivity shocks in accounting for salient features of U.S. economic developments during the second half of the 1990s, including the surge in investment spending, the substantial deterioration of the trade balance, and the modest decline in inflation. We...

A narrowing of the U.S. current account deficit through exchange rate movements is likely to entail a substantial depreciation of the dollar, as stressed in research by Obstfeld and Rogoff. We assess how the adjustment is affected by the high degree of financial integration in the world economy....

Conventional two-country RBC models interpret countercyclical net exports as reflecting, in large part, the dynamics of capital. I show that, quantitatively, theoretical economies rely on counterfactual terms of trade effects: trade fluctuations, on the contrary, are driven primarily by...

This paper examines the business cycle properties of capital goods trade in open economies. Capital good imports and exports are twice as volatile as investment. Equipment trade is asymmetric in that small countries are net importers. Countercyclical trade balances are associated with...

This paper explores the valuation channel of external adjustment in a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model (DSGE) with international equity trading. The theoretical model we set up matches key moments of the data for the United States at business cycle frequency at least as...

Backus, Kehoe, and Kydland (International Real Business Cycles, JPE, 100(4),1992) documented several discrepancies between the observed post-war business cycles of developed countries and the predictions of a two-country, complete-market model. The main discrepancy termed as the “quantity...

Current account crises in emerging markets are characterized by large increases in interest rates, big drops in output, and large real currency depreciations. Current models of crisis with financial frictions do not generate very large movements in these variables. Recent work has shown that the...

This paper introduces trade costs and endogenous number of varieties in an open economy model with monopolistic competition and short run nominal wage rigidities. We show that these two elements have important implications for the international transmission of monetary and productivity shocks....