At the aggregate level, the evidence that deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP) are too persistent to be explained solely by nominal rigidities has long been a puzzle (Rogoff, 1996). Another puzzle from the micro price evidence of the law of one price (LOP), which is the basic building...

In this paper, we argue that differences in the cost structures across sectors play an important role in firms' decisions to adjust their prices. We develop a menu-cost model of pricing in which retail firms intermediate trade between producers and consumers. An important facet of our analysis...

We study the role of distance and time in statistically explaining price dispersion across 32 Swedish towns for 19 commodities from 1732 to 1914. The resulting large number of relative prices (502,689) allows precise estimation of distance and time effects, and their interaction. We find an...

The current account in developed countries is highly persistent and volatile in comparison to output growth. The standard intertemporal current account model with rational expectations (RE) fails to account for the observed current account dynamics together with persistent changes in...

The classical dichotomy predicts that all of the time-series variance in the aggregate real exchange rate is accounted for by non-traded goods in the consumer price index (CPI) basket because traded goods obey the Law of One Price. In stark contrast, Engel (1999) claimed the opposite: that...

In this paper, we establish the consistency of the model selection criterion based on the quasi-marginal likelihood (QML) obtained from Laplace-type estimators. We consider cases in which parameters are strongly identified, weakly identified and partially identified. Our Monte Carlo results...

The search for new ideas by profit-seeking firms and knowledge spillovers are well-known and fundamental sources of modern economic growth. This paper examines the implications of idea production and knowledge capital for monetary business cycles. We construct a sticky-wage model where workers...

This paper investigates the finite sample properties of the two-step estimators of dynamic factor models when unobservable common factors are estimated by the principal components methods in the first step. Effects of the number of individual series on the estimation of an auto-regressive model...

Drawing on recent business cycle research on the Great Depression, we return to an argument we advanced in a 1996 article in the Journal of Monetary Economics—the argument that features of the Hawley-Smoot tariffs could have done more to decrease economic activity than is customarily believed,...