Interest-rate spreads fluctuate widely across time and countries. We characterize their behavior using some 3,200 quarterly observations for 21 advanced and 17 emerging economies since the early 1990s. Before the financial crisis, spreads are 10 times more volatile in emerging economies than in...

We present a unified dynamic framework to study the interconnections between international trade and business cycle models. We prove an aggregate equivalence between a competitive, representative firm model that has aggregate production externalities and dynamic trade models that feature...

Using quarterly data on four commodity exporting countries, we study the explanatory power of real commodity prices for predicting real effective exchange rates, with special attention to the separate roles of different sectoral commodity prices during alternative time periods. We find that the...

We document how product quality responds to exchange rate movements and quantify the extent to which these quality changes affect the aggregate pass-through into export prices. We analyze the substantial sudden appreciation of the Swiss franc post removal of the 1.20-CHF-per-euro lower bound in...

We propose a new channel through which exchange rates affect trade. Exploiting the heterogeneity in firms' foreign currency debt maturity structure around a large depreciation in Colombia, we show that debt revaluation compresses imports due to higher delinquencies and interest rates, while...

This paper studies the spillovers of US monetary policy and the mitigating role of foreign exchange interventions (FXI) by combining deviations from a daily FXI policy rule with high-frequency US monetary policy shocks, daily exchange rates, and firm-level stock prices, as well as firm-level...

Global warming is a serious and acute threat to our planet, but, when negotiating the allocation of permissible carbon emissions, conflicts of interest exist between developed and developing countries. Developing countries insist that global warming is the result of prolonged pollution emissions...

What are the unequal effects of changes in consumer prices on the cost of living? In the context of changes in import prices (driven by, e.g., changes in trade costs or exchange rates), most analyses focus on variation across households in initial expenditure shares on imported goods. However,...

This paper investigates the relationship between real exchange rate changes and the German, French and UK automobile and mechanical engineering sector. In stylized models, exports decline whenever the domestic currency appreciates and vice versa. Strategic firm behavior, however, can obscure the...

Utilizing panel data for 19 OECD countries we find suppor t for the hypothesis that a greater degree of product variety relative to the US helps to explain relative per capita GDP levels. The empirical work relies upon some direct measures of product variety calculated from 6-digit OECD export...