The present note raises the issue of how best to interpret the World Bank’s (WB) much used ‘constant USD per capita income’ concept and similar series. We find that the guide to its construction appearing on the WB data portal to be sketchy. The procedures essentially convert all...

Recent empirical evidence shows that most international prices are sticky in dollars. This paper studies the optimal policy implications of this fact in the context of an open economy model, allowing for an arbitrary structure of asset markets, general preferences and technologies, time-or...

Few papers have tried to project how Chinese monetary policy will behave under flexible exchange rates. As Japan provides an important role model for China, this paper studies the role of the yen/dollar exchange rate for Japanese monetary policy after the shift of Japan from a fixed to a...

For the academic audience, this paper presents the outcome of a well-identified, large change in the monetary policy rule from the lens of a standard New Keynesian model and asks whether the model properly captures the effects. For policymakers, it presents a cautionary tale of the dismal...

The amount of credit in the economy is a heterogeneous aggregate that can be analyzed across different dimensions. Considering such dimensions provides insights into the effect of monetary policy interventions because the credit components are observed to respond differently. Several possible...

Chinese currency policy has had a strong impact on the value of investors' portfolios in recent years. On August 11, 2015, the People's Bank of China announced a new exchange rate policy where the RMB central parity rate against the USD would be determined each morning by the previous day's...

This paper documents that an appreciation of the U.S. dollar is associated with a reduction in the supply of commercial and industrial loans by U.S. banks. An increase in the broad dollar index by 2.5 points (one standard deviation) reduces U.S. banks’ corporate loan originations by 10...

We show that U.S. dollar movements affect syndicated loan terms for U.S. borrowers, even for those without trade exposure. We identify the effect of dollar movements using spread and loan amount adjustments during the syndication process. Using this high-frequency, within loan variation, we find...

This paper establishes a causal link between the dollar exchange rate and international trade flows, employing a new instrument for the U.S. Dollar that is based on domestic U.S. housing activity (Ma and Zhang (2019)). In line with the dominant currency paradigm (Gopinath et al. (2020)), import...