The real exchange rate is said to be the single most important price in an economy. While we used to think that we knew what explained its movements (e.g., the Balassa-Samuelson effect), the recent much-cited result by Engel (1999) proposes a serious reinterpretation i.e., nearly 100% of the...

In this paper we test the purchasing power parity for the post Bretton Woods period for 18 main industrial countries. As base currencies we use alternatively the Deutsche mark, the Japanese yen, and the US dollar. We employ error correction models for single countries and on the level of pooled...

We argue that even in perfectly frictionless markets risk aversion driven by exchange rate uncertainty may cause a wedge between the domestic and foreign price of a totally homogeneous good. We test our hypothesis using a natural experiment based on a unique micro-data set from a market with...