The U.S. sacrifices about ten full time jobs for each million dollars of net imports of goods and services. Its billions of dollars in trade deficit is the primary reason behind its millions of job losses. Loss of jobs, in turn, decreases income, demand, investment, and tax revenues. Budget...

International Macroeconomics has long sought an explanation for current account fluctuations that matches the data. The approaches have typically focused on better models and new macroeconomic variables. We demonstrate the limitations of this approach by showing that idiosyncratic shocks are an...

We study the behavior of real exchange rates in a two-country dynamic equilibrium model. In this model, consumers can only consume domestic goods but can invest costlessly in capital stocks of both countries. Nevertheless, transporting goods between the two countries is costly and, hence, the...

Using long-span data on the dollar-sterling and dollar-franc real exchange rates over the past two centuries, we apply the findings of various strands of the recent literature in order to examine the statistical and economic significance of the Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson effect (the effect of...

This paper examines the long-run validity of purchasing power parity (PPP) for fourteen developing countries. The period examined is 1973:4 through 2002:8. The methods of Elliot, Rothemberg and Stock (1996), Kwiattkowski et al. (1992) and Geweke and Porter-Hudak (1983) are employed to detect the...

Finding evidence of the theoretical relationship between exchange rate and inflation has been a difficult proposition in an exchange rate market, despite many studies in developed markets. Three recent papers employing a new research design, Theil’s Divisia index method, found that this...