This paper investigates empirically and attempts to identify the sources of real exchange rate fluctuations since the collapse of Bretton Woods. The paper's first two sections survey and extend earlier, non-structural empirical work on this subject by Campbell and Clarida (1987), Meese and...

What are the shocks that drive economic fluctuations? I examine technology and money shocks in some detail, and briefly review the evidence on oil price and credit shocks. I conclude that none of these popular candidates accounts for the bulk of economic fluctuations. I then examine whether...

Traditional approaches to structural vector autoregressions can be viewed as special cases of Bayesian inference arising from very strong prior beliefs. These methods can be generalized with a less restrictive formulation that incorporates uncertainty about the identifying assumptions...

Identifying assumptions need to be imposed on dynamic models before they can be used to analyze the dynamic effects of economically interesting shocks. Often, the assumptions are only rich enough to identify a set of solutions. This paper considers two types of restrictions on the structural...

Conventional analysis of the welfare effects of U.S. oil price regulation in the 1970's focuses on the deadweight losses in the oil market. This paper argues that such analysis substantially understates the benefits from decontrolling prices, because decontrol will lead to an improvement in the...

A sticky-price model is used to motivate a structural VAR analysis of the current account and the real exchange rate for seven major industrialized countries (the US, Canada, the UK, Japan, Germany, France and Italy). The analysis is distinguished from previous work in that it adopts minimal...

This paper shows that the quantitative predictions of an equilibrium asset pricing model with financial frictions are consistent with the large consumption and current-account reversals and asset-price collapses observed in the "Sudden Stops" of emerging markets crises. Margin requirements set a...

This paper develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with putty-clay technology that incorporates embodied technology, investment irreversibility, and variable capacity utilization. Low short-run capital-labor substitutability native to the putty-clay framework induces the...