The central puzzle in international business cycles is that real exchange rates are volatile and persistent. The most popular story for real exchange rate fluctuations is that they are generated by monetary shocks interacting with sticky goods prices. We quantify this story and find that it can...

The data show large and persistent deviations of real exchange rates from purchasing power parity. Recent work has shown that to a large extent these movements are driven by deviations from the law of one price for traded goods. In the data, real and nominal exchange rates are about 6 times as...

There is much debate about the usefulness of the neoclassical growth model for assessing the macro-economic impact of fiscal shocks. We test the theory using data from World War II, which is by far the largest fiscal shock in the history of the United States. We take observed changes in fiscal...

"In this paper, I characterize equilibria for a sticky-price model in which Federal Reserve policy is an interest-rate rule similar to that described in Taylor (1993). For standard preferences and technologies used in the literature, the model predicts that the nominal interest rate is...

"Gali and Rabanal provide statistical evidence that, in their view, puts into question the real business cycle paradigm in favor of the sticky-price paradigm. I demonstrate that their statistical procedure is easily misled in that they would reach the same conclusions even if their data had been...

"Some economists argue that the neoclassical growth model cannot account for the macroeconomic effects of big fiscal shocks. This paper reassesses this view. We test the theory using data from World War II, which is by far the largest fiscal shock in the history of the United States. We take...