Do countries compete for FDI by liberalizing their FDI policy regimes? Our measure of FDI policy liberalization is an event count of changes made by a country in a given year in the areas of approval procedures, sectoral restrictions, operational conditions, incentives, investment guarantees,...

In an influential paper, Engel and West (2005) claim that the near random-walk behavior of nominal exchange rates is an equilibrium outcome of a variant of present-value models when economic fundamentals follow exogenous first-order integrated processes and the discount factor approaches one....

This paper presents the novel implications of introducing price rigidities into a model of good-specific habit formation, for the response of private consumption following a positive government spending shock. With ’deep’ habits in demand, the price elasticity of demand rises after the...

This paper models Chinese inflation using an output gap Phillips curve. Inflation modelling for the world's sixth largest economy is a still under-researched topic. We estimate a partially forward-looking Phillips curve as well as traditional backward-looking Phillips curves. Using quarterly...

Much research studies US inflation history with a trend-cycle model with unobserved components. A key feature of this model is that the trend may be viewed as the Fed’s evolving inflation target or long-horizon expected inflation. We provide a new way to measure the slowly evolving trend and...

This paper investigates the influence of liquidity in the major developed and major developing economies on commodity prices. Liquidity is taken to be M2. A novel finding is that unanticipated increases in the BRIC countries’ liquidity is associated with significant and persistent increases in...

We prove that the Generalized Taylor Principle, under which the nominal interest rate reacts more than one-for-one to inflation in the long run, is a necessary and (under some extra mild restrictions on parameters) sufficient condition for determinacy in a sticky price model with positive...

A puzzle from the Great Recession is an apparent mismatch between a fall in the persistence of European inflation rates, and the increased variability of expert forecasts of inflation. We explain this puzzle and show how country specific beliefs about inflation are still quite close to the...

The Calvo pricing model that lies at the heart of many New Keynesian business cycle models has been roundly criticized for being inconsistent both with time series data on inflation and with micro-data on the frequency of price changes. In this paper I develop a new pricing model whose structure...

We study micro price dynamics and their macroeconomic implications using daily scanner data from 1988 to 2013. We provide five facts. First, posted prices in Japan are ten times as flexible as those in the U.S. scanner data. Second, regular prices are almost as flexible as those in the U.S. and...