Over the past century, the ratio of international trade to GDP has not grown substantially for most major OECD economies. We conjecture that growth in intra-industry trade has been offset by a decline in intra-industry trade. Inter-industry trade may have declined either because of biased growth...

This paper looks for dynamic patterns in international trade flows using multilateral American and Japanese data disaggregated to the four-digit SITC level. Little evidence is found of product-cycle dynamics between 1962 and 1988; rather, goods that begin the sample in surplus (deficit) tend to...

A growing body of empirical work has found evidence of a decline in exchange rate pass-through to import prices in a number of industrial countries. Our paper complements this work by examining pass-through from the other side of the transaction; that is, we assess the exchange rate sensitivity...

This paper documents a sustained decline in exchange rate pass-through to U.S. import prices, from above 0.5 during the 1980s to somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.2 during the last decade. This decline in the pass-through coefficient is robust to the measure of foreign prices that is included...

This paper examines Japan's experience in the first half of the 1990s to shed some light on several issues that arise as inflation declines toward zero. Is it possible to recognize when an economy is moving into a phase of sustained deflation? How quickly should monetary policy respond to sharp...

In a world of mobile capital, the current system of nominal interest taxation implies that the cost of capital and the return to saving in each country are strongly and negatively correlated with the rate of inflation. It follows that a country's net foreign asset position (and its current...

This paper uses a macroeconomic model with rational expectations to analyze issues related to German unification. A principal focus of the paper is the effect of unification on member countries of the European Monetary System. Under certain conditions, German unification has a contractionary...

The economics literature offers competing hypotheses about the relationship between savings rates and output variability. This paper examines data for eight industrial countries to determine if there is a discernible pattern between savings rates and cyclical volatility of output. We find a...

In this paper we provide two building blocks for an analysis of international policy coordination: (1) a survey of models of policy coordination, and (2) an account of experience with policy coordination among the G-7 countries and within Europe since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods System....

Fast-growing countries tend to experience rapid export growth with little secular change in their terms of trade. This contradicts the standard Armington trade model, which predicts that fast-growing countries can experience rapid export growth only to the extent that they accept declining terms...