In his papers during the lead up to the birth of the European Monetary Union, Obstfeld considered whether the countries forming the EMU were sufficiently similar to survive a single monetary policy--and more importantly, whether they had the capacity to adjust to asymmetric shocks given a single...

We use the structure of the Melitz (2003) model to compare the cost of living and welfare across countries, while incorporating product variety measured by the count of barcodes or firms. For 47 countries, we compare welfare relative to the United States to conventional measures of real...

Many price indices must be constructed without quantity data at the elementary level. We show that for some consumer goods in the United States and other countries, one can approximate expenditure shares using weights derived from the retail distribution of sellers. These weights are based on...

We examine the relationship between large firms and the rising profit share in a model that features oligopolistic competition and consumer heterogeneity. Conditional on the sales distribution, the presence of consumer heterogeneity increases the profit share because it increases firm-level...

We derive a new formula for the optimal uniform tariff in a small-country, heterogeneous-firm model with roundabout production and a nontraded good. Tariffs are applied on imported intermediate inputs. First-best policy requires that markups on domestic intermediate inputs are offset by...

We derive a small open economy (SOE) as the limit of an economy as the number or size of its trading partners goes to infinity and trade costs also go to infinity. We obtain this limit in the Armington, Eaton-Kortum, Krugman, and Melitz models. In all cases, the trade of the SOE with the foreign...

This paper surveys the decline in real interest rates in advanced and emerging economies over the past several decades, linking that process to a range of global factors that have operated with different force in different periods. The paper argues that estimates of long-run equilibrium real...

A key precursor of twentieth-century financial crises in emerging and advanced economies alike was the rapid buildup of leverage. Those emerging economies that avoided leverage booms during the 2000s also were most likely to avoid the worst effects of the twenty-first century's first global...

The U.S. dollar's nominal effective exchange rate closely tracks global financial conditions, which themselves show a cyclical pattern. Over that cycle, world asset prices, leverage, and capital flows move in concert with global growth, especially influencing the fortunes of emerging and...