This paper argues that productivity puzzles like the Solow Paradox arise, in part, from the omission of an important dimension of the debate: the resource cost of achieving a given rate of technical change. A remedy is proposed in which a new parameter, defined as the cost elasticity of...

This paper studies the cross-country patterns of risky innovation and growth through the lens of international trade. We use a simple theoretical framework of risky quality upgrading by firms under varying levels of financial development to derive two predictions. First, the mean rate of quality...

This paper studies exchange rate behavior in models with moving long-run equilibria incorporating alternative price-adjustment mechanisms.The paper demonstrates that price-adjustment rules proposed by Mussa andby Barro and Grossman yield models that are empirically indistinguishable from each...

The closed and open economy literatures work on evaluating the role of real rigidities, but in parallel. This paper brings the two literatures together. We use international price data and exchange rate shocks to evaluate the importance of real rigidities in price setting. We show that...

We analyze the policy trade-offs generated by local currency price stability of imports in economies where upstream producers strategically interact with downstream firms selling the final goods to consumers. We study the effects of staggered price setting at the downstream level on the optimal...

The inertia of the local-currency prices of traded goods in the face of exchange-rate changes is a well-documented phenomenon in International Economics. This paper develops a structural model to identify the sources of this local-currency price stability and applies it to micro data from the...

Import prices typically change by a smaller proportion than the exchange rate between the exporting and importing country. Recent research indicates that common-currency relative prices for similar goods exported to different markets are highly correlated with exchange rates between those...

This paper explores the relationship between exchange rate pass-through and market share for monopolistically competitive exporters. Under fairly general assumptions we show that pass-through should be high for exporters based in a country with a very large share of total destination market...