A central puzzle in international finance is that real exchange rates are volatile and, in stark contradiction to effcient risk-sharing, negatively correlated with cross-country consumption ratios. This paper shows that incomplete asset markets and a low price elasticity of tradables can account...

This paper investigates the role of three likely factors in driving the steady deterioration of the US external balance: US technology developments, changes in the US government fiscal position and the Fed’s monetary policy. Estimating several Vector Autoregressions on US data over the period...

This paper estimates the effects of technology shocks in VAR models of the U.S., identified by imposing restrictions on the sign of impulse responses. These restrictions are consistent with the implications of a popular class of DSGE models, with both real and nominal frictions, and with...