This paper characterizes the integration patterns of international currency unions (such as the CFA Franc Zone). We empirically explore different features of currency unions, and compare them to countries with sovereign monies by examining the criteria for Mundell's concept of an optimum...

We explore the link between an interest rate rule for monetary policy and the behavior of the real exchange rate. The interest rate rule, in conjunction with some standard assumptions, implies that the deviation of the real exchange rate from its steady state depends on the present value of a...

The paper estimates a model for the real U.S/U.K. exchange rate. The Kalman filter is used to identify a permanent and transitory component. We find the variance of the transitory component shifts among three states according to a Markov-switching process. The model is estimated by Gibbs...

When equity prices are determined as the discounted sum of current and expected future dividends, Shiller (1981) and LeRoy and Porter (1981) derived a relationship between the variance of the price of equities, p[subscript t] and the variance of the ex post realized discounted sum of current and...

We use new disaggregated data on consumer prices to determine why there is variability in prices of similar goods across U.S. cities. We address questions similar to those that have arisen in the international context: is this variability purely a result of market segmentation or do sticky...

This paper examines optimal exchange rate policy in two-country sticky-price general equilibrium models in which households and firms optimize over an infinite horizon in an environment of uncertainty. The models are in the vein of the "new open-economy macroeconomics" as exemplified by Obstfeld...

Over the past four decades, there has been a substantial increase in financial globalization, that is, rapid growth in gross external portfolio positions. There has also been a substantial fall in the variability of inflation. Many economists have conjectured that financial globalization...

To what degree can the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the East Asian crisis be accounted for within a dynamic general equilibrium model? This paper investigates that question using a framework in which the crisis itself is modeled as an exogenous shock to the country risk premium. This...