How rigid are producer prices? A longstanding conventional wisdom among economists holds that producer prices are more rigid than, and so play less of an allocative role than do, consumer prices. In the 1987-2008 microdata collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for the producer price...

This paper examines the determinants of cross-border flows of U.S. dollar banknotes, using a new panel data set of bilateral flows between the United States and 103 countries from 1990 to 2007. We show that a gravity model explains international flows of currency as well as it explains...

This paper examines the use of U.S. cash dollars as a secondary currency in informal transactions worldwide. While there is considerable interest in and a large theoretical literature on the use of secondary currencies, few empirical results have been established. The primary reason is that the...

Despite its importance, the microeconomics of the international transmission of shocks is not well understood. The conventional wisdom is that relative price changes are the primary mechanism by which shocks are transmitted across borders. Yet traded-goods prices exhibit significant inertia in...

A growing share of international trade occurs through intra-firm transactions, transactions between domestic and foreign subsidiaries of a multinational firm. The difficulties associated with writing and enforcing a vertical contract compound when a product must cross a national border, and may...

This paper quantifies the welfare effects of a change in the nominal exchange rate using the example of the beer market. I estimate a structural econometric model that makes it possible to compute manufacturers' and retailers' pass-through of a nominal exchange-rate change, without observing...