We decompose the response of aggregate consumption to monetary policy shocks into contributions by households at different stages of the life cycle. This decomposition finds that older households have a higher consumption response than younger households. Amongst older households, the...

Using recently developed model selection procedures, we determine that exchange rate returns are driven by a two-factor model. We identify them as a dollar factor and a euro factor. Exchange rates are thus driven by global, US, and Euro-zone stochastic discount factors. The identified factors...

Three potential sources of bias present complications for estimating the half-life of purchasing power parity deviations from panel data. They are the bias associated with inapproiate aggregation across heterogeneous coefficients, time aggregation of commodity prices, and downward bias in...

We study the dynamics of price indices for major U.S. cities using panel econometric methods and find that relative price levels among cities mean revert at an exceptionally slow rate. In a panel of 19 cities from 1918 to 1995, we estimate the half-life of convergence to be approximately nine...

When central banks set nominal interest rates according to an interest rate reaction function, such as the Taylor rule, and the exchange rate is priced by uncovered interest parity, the real exchange rate is determined by expected inflation differentials and output gap differentials. In this...

Can standard business-cycle methodology be applied to China? In this chapter, we address this question by examining the macroeconomic time series and identifying dimensions in which China differs from economies (such as Canada and the U.S.) that are typically the subject of business-cycle...

We construct factors from a cross section of exchange rates and use the idiosyncratic deviations from the factors to forecast. In a stylized data generating process, we show that such forecasts can be effective even if there is essentially no serial correlation in the univariate exchange rate...

Standard models of exchange rates, based on macroeconomic variables such as prices, interest rates, output, etc., are thought by many researchers to have failed empirically. We present evidence to the contrary. First, we emphasize the point that "beating a random walk" in forecasting is too...

Trending current accounts pose a challenge for intertemporal open-economy macro models. This paper shows that a two-country representative-agent business cycle model is able to explain the historical time-paths of the US and Japanese current accounts, both of which display trends but in opposite...

Multiple cointegrating regressions are frequently encountered in empirical work as, for example, in the analysis of panel data. When the equilibrium errors are correlated across equations, the seemingly unrelated regression estimation strategy can be applied to cointegrating regressions to...