This paper describes the updating of the NBER trade dataset, which now provides U.S. import and export values to the year 2001, disaggregated by Harmonized System (HS), Standard International Trade Classification (SITC), and the U.S. Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) categories. In...

The purpose of the paper is to measure the potential bias in the U.S. import price index due to the appearance of new product varieties, or new foreign suppliers, and determine the effect of this bias on the estimated income elasticity of import demand. Existing import price indexes are based on...

Economic policy uncertainty affects decisions of households, businesses, policy makers and Financial intermediaries. We first examine the impact of economic policy uncertainty on aggregate bank credit growth. Then we analyze commercial bank entity level data to gauge the effects of policy...

This paper offers an explanation for the persistence observed in real exchange rate movements. The model combines pricing to market behavior with sticky prices generated by staggered contracts. A translog preference structure is sued to enhance both features. The paper finds that openness limits...

Recent cross-country investigations of the role of institutional fundamentals such as the protection of property rights in promoting financial development have extended a literature that has for decades maintained that financial factors can affect real outcomes. In this paper we pursue this new...

This paper argues that the theoretical foundations for the gravity equation are general, while the empirical performance of the gravity equation is specific to the type of goods examined. Most existing theory for the gravity equation depends on the assumption of differentiated goods. We show...

This paper examines the ability of a simple stylized general equilibrium model that incorporates nominal wage rigidity to explain the magnitude and persistence of the Great Depression in the United States. The impulses to our analysis are money supply shocks. The Taylor contracts model is...

We evaluate the endogenous growth hypothesis using sectoral data for South Korea and Taiwan. Our empirical work relies on a direct measure of the variety of products from each sector which can serve as intermediate inputs or as final goods. We test whether changes in the variety of these inputs,...

We develop a procedure to rank-order countries and commodities using dis-aggregated American imports data. We find strong evidence that both countries and commodities can be ranked, consistent with the product cycle' hypothesis. Countries habitually begin to export goods to the United States...