The real exchange rate is said to be the single most important price in an economy. While we used to think that we knew what explained its movements (e.g., the Balassa-Samuelson effect), the recent much-cited result by Engel (1999) proposes a serious reinterpretation i.e., nearly 100% of the...

Standard models of international risk sharing with complete asset markets predict a positive association between relative consumption growth and real exchange-rate depreciations across countries. The striking lack of evidence for this link — the consumption/real exchange-rate anomaly or...