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...

This paper studies how status competition for marriage partners can generate surprising effects on the real exchange rate (RER). In theory, a rise in the sex ratio (increasing relative surplus of men) can generate a decline in the RER. The effect can be quantitatively large if the biological...