Nominal rigidities due to menu costs have become a standard element in closed economy macroeconomic modeling. The "New Open Economy Macroeconomics" literature has investigated the implications of nominal rigidities in an open economy context and found that the currency in which prices are set...

Empirical evidence shows that macroeconomic fundamentals have little explana-tory power for nominal exchange rates. On the other hand, the recent “microstruc-ture approach to exchange rates” has shown that most exchange rate volatility at short to medium horizons is related to order flows....

Recent episodes (October 2008, May 2010, August 2011) have witnessed huge spikes in equity price risk (implied volatility). Apart from their large size, several features characterize these risk panics. They are global phenomena, shared among a broad set of countries. There is substantial...

There has been a long debate about whether speculators are stabilizing or not. We consider a model where speculators have a stabilizing role in normal times, but may also provoke large risk panics. The very feature that makes arbitrageurs liquidity providers in normal times, namely their...

Recent crises have seen large spikes in asset price risk. We propose an explanation for such panics based on self-fulfilling shifts in beliefs about risk. A negative link between the current level and the future risk of an asset price leads to a circular relationship between the stochastic...

This paper develops a simple general-equilibrium framework to study the effect of the exchange-rate system on trade and welfare. An important feature of the model is deviations from purchasing-power parity, caused by rigid price setting in buyers' currency. In a benchmark model with separable...

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