A central puzzle in international finance is that real exchange rates are volatile and, in stark contradiction to effcient risk-sharing, negatively correlated with cross-country consumption ratios. This paper shows that incomplete asset markets and a low price elasticity of tradables can account...

How should monetary policy respond to excessive capital inflows that appreciate the currency and widen the external deficit? Using the workhorse two-country open-macro model, we derive a quadratic approximation of the utility-based global loss function in incomplete market economies, and solve...

Since the adoption of flexible exchange rates, real exchange rates have been much more volatile than they were under Bretton Woods. However, the volatilities of most other macroeconomic variables have remained approximately unchanged. This poses a puzzle for standard international business cycle...

This paper builds a baseline two-country model of real and monetary transmission under optimal international proce discrimination. Distributing traded goods to consumers reuires nontradables; because of distributive trade, the proce elasticity of export demand depends on the exchange rate....

The euro area has been experiencing a prolonged period of weak economic activity and very low inflation. This paper reviews models of business cycle stabilization with an eye to formulating lessons for policy in the euro area. According to standard models, after a large recessionary shock...

Skeptic views on EMU are usually cast around three arguments. First, the EU does not satisfy 'Optimum Currency Area' (OCA) conditions. Second, heterogeneous economic and financial structures will produce differences in monetary transmission. Third, the shift from domestic to area-wide...

This paper estimates the effects of technology shocks in VAR models of the U.S., identified by imposing restrictions on the sign of impulse responses. These restrictions are consistent with the implications of a popular class of DSGE models, with both real and nominal frictions, and with...

This paper investigates the role of three likely factors in driving the steady deterioration of the US external balance: US technology developments, changes in the US government fiscal position and the Fed’s monetary policy. Estimating several Vector Autoregressions on US data over the period...

This paper studies the international spillovers of US monetary policy shocks on a number of macroeconomic and financial variables in 36 advanced and emerging economies. In most countries, a surprise US monetary tightening leads to depreciation against the dollar; industrial production and real...

This paper estimates and compares the international transmission of European Central Bank (ECB) and Federal Reserve System monetary policy in a unified and methodologically consistent framework. It identifies pure monetary policy shocks by purging them of the bias stemming from contemporaneous...