We use a Bayesian approach to estimate a standard two-country New Open Economy Macroeconomics model using data for the United States and the euro area, and we perform model comparisons to study the importance of departing from the law of one price and complete markets assumptions. Our results...

In the late 1980s Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago found themselves in severe economic difficulties. Their ensuing economic strategies were all market-based, featured fiscal contraction and trade liberalization, multilateral support loans and, later on, tax and financial sector...

The paper examines the effects of exchange rate fluctuations on real output and the price level in a sample of 33 developing countries. The theoretical model decomposes movements in the exchange rate into anticipated and unanticipated components. Unanticipated currency fluctuations help to...

This paper examines the effects of trade costs on macroeconomic volatility. We first construct a dynamic, two-country general equilibrium model, where the degree of market integration depends directly on trade costs (transport costs, tariffs, etc.). The model is a extension of Obstfeld and...

This paper analyzes the degree to which fluctuations in the nominal exchange rate passthrough to consumer prices in South Africa. While the average pass-through is found to be low, evidence from a structural vector autoregression suggests it is much higher for nominal (versus real) shocks....

While new conventional wisdom warns that developing countries should be aware of the risks of premature capital account liberalization, the costs of not removing exchange controls have received much less attention. This paper investigates the negative effects of exchange controls on trade. To...

Ireland has had significant competitiveness gains in the 1990s on the basis of the standard manufacturing unit labor cost-based measure of the real effective exchange rate. A handful of sectors mostly dominated by multinational companies have accounted for the bulk of value added in production....

This paper discusses the forces driving capital flows in the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It argues that various influences—specifically, the real exchange rate history and trend and the factor intensity of production—can combine to motivate very large capital...

Statistical measures of the volatility of exchange rates, interest rates, and stock prices are estimated for a number of countries. Periods of high volatility are identified and compared with periods of financial difficulty. The results indicate that GARCH models of volatility could be...

Based on the Johansen cointegration estimation methodology, much of the long-run behavior of the real effective exchange rate of South Africa can be explained by real interest rate differentials, GDP per capita (both relative to trading partners), real commodity prices, trade openness, the...