The deterioration in the financial climate over the past12 months has eroded consumers’ confidence in theirown financial security, with 58% of consumers eitherdisagreeing (33%) or disagreeing strongly (25%) thatthey feel more financially secure.This can be attributed, to some extent, to...

Interest in commodity prices as indicators of consumerprice inflation has ebbed and flowed withthe rise and fall in commodity prices themselves.True to form, as commodity prices have surged inthe last two years (Chart 1), interest in their predictivepower has returned. Inflation hawks point to...

This paper examines the economic exposure of German corporations to changes in the DM/US-dollar exchange-rate. Our work contributes to the existing body of literature in the following ways. Firstly, we point out conceptual problems of previous attempts to estimate economic exposure. Secondly, we...

Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die empirische Regelmäßigkeit, dass Faktorpreise, insbesondere Lohnniveaus, sich im Länderquerschnitt nicht anpassen. Die Studie bietet einen möglichen Erklärungsansatz: Ein allgemeines stochastisches Gleichgewichtsmodell mit monopolistischer Konkurrenz auf...

The U.S. dollar holds a dominant place in the invoicing of international trade, along two complementary dimensions. First, most U.S. exports and imports invoiced in dollars. Second, trade flows that donot involve the United States are also substantially invoiced in dollars, an aspect that has...

We study high-frequency exchange rate movements over the sample 1993–2006. We document that the (Swiss) franc, euro, Japanese yen and the pound tend to appreciate against the U.S. dollar when (a) S&P has negative returns; (b) U.S. bond prices increase; and (c) when currency markets become more...

Two well-known, but seemingly contradictory, features of exchange rates are thatthey are close to a random walk while at the same time exchange rate changesare predictable by interest rate differentials. In this paper we investigate whetherthese two features of the data may in fact be related....

While empirical evidence nds only a weak relationship between nominal exchangerates and macroeconomic fundamentals, forex markets participants often attribute ex-change rate movements to a macroeconomic variable. The variables that matter, how-ever, appear to change over time and some variable...

This paper offers empirical evidence that real exchange rate volatility can have a significant impact on the long-term rate of productivity growth, but the eect depends critically on a country's level of financial development. For countries with relatively low levels of financial development,...