A central puzzle in international finance is that real exchange rates are volatile and, in stark contradiction to efficient risk-sharing, negatively correlated with relative consumptions across countries. This paper shows that a model with incomplete markets and a low price elasticity of imports...

Since the adoption of flexible exchange rates in the early 1970s, real exchange rates have been much more volatile than they were under Bretton Woods. However, the literature showed that the volatilities of most other macroeconomic variables have not been affected by the change in exchange-rate...

Using survey-based measures of future U.S. economic activity from the Livingston Survey and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, the authors study how changes in expectations, and their interaction with monetary policy, contribute to fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates. They find that...

The volatility of the U.S. economy since the mid-1980s is much lower than it was during the prior 20-year period. The proximate causes of the increased stability and their relative importance remain unsettled, but the sharpness of the volatility decline and its timing has led authors such as...

This paper documents the implications of arbitrage costs on the behavior of exchange rates in an open-economy liquidity model. The main motivation behind the paper is the growing evidence that the well-documented departures from purchasing power parity are due to a failure of the law of one...

Using survey data on expectations, the authors examine whether the post-war data are consistent with theories of a self-fulfilling inflation episode during the 1970s. Among commonly cited factors, oil and fiscal shocks do not appear to have triggered an increase in expected inflation that was...

A large body of literature documents that returns from currency speculation are highly volatile and possess a predictable component, which is itself highly volatile and serially correlated. Explaining the returns from currency speculation through the presence of a risk premium has proven...

Are the recessionary consequences of oil-price shocks due to oil-price shocks themselves or to contractionary monetary policies that arise in response to inflation concerns engendered by rising oil prices? Can systematic monetary policy be used to alleviate the consequences of oil shocks on the...

Swedish law mandates the removal of information about past credit arrears from the individuals’ credit reports after three years. By exploiting a quasi-experimental variation in retention times caused by a change in the credit bureau’s timing of arrear removal, we are able to examine the...