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...

The authors develop a two-country, two-sector general equilibrium business cycle model with nominal rigidities featuring deviations from the law of one price. The paper shows that a model with these features can quantitatively account for the empirical fact that of the statistical properties of...

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...

The authors analyze the effects of government spending cuts on economic activity in an environment of severe fiscal strain, as reflected by a sizeable risk premium on government debt. Specifically, they consider a "sovereign risk channel," through which sovereign default risk spills over to the...

According to conventional wisdom, fiscal policy is more effective under a fixed than under a flexible exchange rate regime. In this paper the authors reconsider the transmission of shocks to government spending across these regimes within a standard New Keynesian model of a small open economy....