We examine whether the Chinese exchange rate is misaligned and how Chinese trade flows respond to the exchange rate and to economic activity. We find, first, that the Chinese currency, the renminbi (RMB), is substantially below the value predicted by estimates based upon a cross-country sample,...

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...

According to the Balassa-Samuelson effect, productivity gains in the domestic tradable sector raise the relative price of domestic non-tradables causing deviations from the purchasing power parity. In the literature, the Balassa-Samuelson effect is typically invoked to explain the Penn effect,...

Using panel data on military spending for 125 countries, we document new facts about the effects of changes in government purchases on the real exchange rate, consumption, and current accounts in both advanced and developing countries. While an increase in government purchases causes real...

Whether cross-border financial market integration has raised global insurance, is still a controversial issue in the literature. If this is so, what should we observe in the data? The insurance literature emphasizes that efficient risk-sharing requires financial markets to channel resources to...

This paper analyzes the relation between nominal exchange rate volatility and several macroeconomic variables, namely real per output growth, excess credit, foreign direct investment (FDI) and the current account balance, in the Central and Eastern European EU Member States. Using panel...

This paper examines the mechanisms through which government spending affects the dynamics of the real exchange rate. Using a two-sector dependent open economy model with intersectoral mobility costs for private capital, we show that public investment generates a (i) non-monotonic U-shaped...

The real effective exchange rate (REER) is one of the most cited statistical constructs in open-economy macroeconomics. We show that the models used to compute these numbers are not rich enough to allow for the rising importance of global value chains. Moreover, because different sectors within...

We propose a new Quantity Dual Approach (QDA) to estimate the contribution of nontraded goods to Real Exchange Rate (RER) fluctuations. This method is immune to the bias resulting from the non-inclusion of some goods in CPI calculations and can be applied even in a stringent data environment...

For the past three decades, Eastern European countries overall, but not uniformly, have exhibited a noticeable decline in their share of the industrial production sector. At the same time, trade liberalization and integration in international production networks were intensified, bringing...