There is an ongoing debate in the literature on whether global trade flows have become disconnected from the large real effective exchange rate movements in the wake of the global financial crisis. The question has important policy implications for the role of exchange rates in supporting growth...

After the decline in oil prices, many oil exporters face the need to improve their external balances. Special characteristics of oil exporters make the exchange rate an ineffective instrument for this purpose and give fiscal policy a sizeable role. These conclusions are supported by regression...

When does trade become a one-way relationship? We study bilateral trade balances for a sample of 18 European countries over the period from 1948 through 2008. We find that, with the introduction of the euro, trade imbalances among euro area members widened considerably, even after allowing for...

This paper uses a Ricardian framework to clarify the role of microeconomic and macroeconomic factors governing the time series and cross-section behavior of sectoral trade balances. Unit labor costs and trade balances are calculated for several sectors for the seven major industrial countries....

Monetary policy entails demand augmenting and demand diverting effects, with its impact on the trade balance-and spillovers to other countries-depending on the relative magnitude of these opposing effects. Using US data, and a sign-restricted structural VAR identification strategy, we...

The strong US policy response to the 2008-09 financial crisis raised concerns about its impact (spillovers) on other countries, with great focus on the monetary stimulus but little attention to fiscal policy, despite their combined deployment. Using a sign-restricted structural VAR approach, we...

China''s sectoral trade composition, product quality mix, and import content of processing exports have all changed substantially during the past decade. This has rendered trade elasticities estimated using aggregate data highly unstable, with more recent data pointing to significantly higher...

Using two recently constructed measures of trade liberalization dates, this research studies the impact of trade liberalization on imports, exports, and overall trade balance for a large sample of developing countries. We find strong and consistent evidence that trade liberalization leads to...

A reduced-form model approach was used to estimate the trade balance response to permanent domestic currency depreciation. For this purpose, long-run and short-run effects were estimated, using three modeling methods along with two real effective exchange rate measures. On average, a 1 percent...