A decade ago the Economist began an annual survey of Big Mac prices as a guide to whether currencies are trading at the right exchange rates. This paper asks how well the hamburger standard has performed. Although average deviations from absolute Big Mac parity are large for several currencies,...

This note tests the hypothesis that nominal interest differentials between similar assets denominated in different currencies can be explained entirely by the expected change in the exchange rate over the holding period. This proposition, often called the "Fisher open" hypothesis or the...

The Balassa-Samuelson model, which explains real exchange rate movements in terms of sectoral productivities, rests on two components. First, for a class of technologies including Cobb-Douglas, the model implies that the relative price of nontraded goods in each country should reflect the...

A new theory of price determination suggests that if primary surpluses are independent of the level of debt, the price level has to jump' to assure fiscal solvency. In this regime (which we call Fiscal Dominant), monetary policy has to work through seignorage to control the price level. If on...