Employing propensity score reweighting and event-based strategies, we provide evidence that sustained real exchange rate (RER) misalignments have significant effects on economic development: positive on GDP per capita and capital stock in the case of undervaluation, and negative on the capital...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the effects of the real exchange rate (RER) on international trade, economic development and growth. We summarize the main conceptual issues, discuss the relevance of the RER as an instrument of development policy, provide an...

I develop the implications for real exchange rate cycles of different policy preferences, focusing in particular on broadly stylized features of major Latin American and East Asian economies. Recent political science literature has emphasized the role of factors such as the influence of the...

Many developing countries have adopted investor-friendly policies in recent years in order to attract export-oriented foreign direct investment (FDI). The effects of these policies on the external accounts have been largely ignored. This paper endogenizes FDI inflows in a structuralist general...

This study applies the Balance of Payments Constrained Growth (BPCG) model to India, a large developing country with a relatively low trade to GDP ratio. Rather than assuming similar elasticities of substitution between goods produced in different regions, the study extends the model to relax...

Existing empirical studies have focused on determinants of investment. We focus instead on episodes of accelerated capital stock growth that last eight years or longer. We find that episodes are relatively common, even in low growth regions, but more so in middle income and Asian countries....

Real exchange rate policy can potentially be utilized to target the trade balance and/or development through capital accumulation. However, the presence of distributional conflict and the trade-off between current and future trade imbalances complicates matters. I show that policy assignment...

This paper discusses some of the inter-temporal issues that arise in the pursuit of real undervaluation to achieve rapid development. Policy makers face a trade-off between achieving a capital stock target in a given amount of time on the one hand and boosting real wages and output in the short...

This paper first documents the foreign currency exposures of Switzerland in the 2002-2012 period. We find that the large scale of the Swiss international balance sheet means that movements in the Swiss Franc generate large cross-border valuation effects. Second, we examine the Swiss Franc...