Using data for El Salvador and Bayesian techniques, we develop and estimate a two-sector dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to analyze the effects of remittances in emerging market economies. We find that, whether altruistically motivated or otherwise, an increase in remittance flows...

A puzzle in international macroeconomics is that observed real exchange rates are highly volatile. Standard international real business cycle (IRBC) models cannot reproduce this fact. We show that total factor productivity processes for the United States and the rest of the world are...

Using disaggregated sectorial data, this study shows that rising levels of remittances have spending effects that lead to real exchange rate appreciation and resource movement effects that favor the nontradable sector at the expense of tradable goods production. These characteristics are two...

Greece, Portugal and Spain face a serious risk of external solvency due to their close to minus 100 percent of GDP net negative international investment positions, which are largely composed of debt. The perceived inability of these countries to rebalance their external positions is a major root...

This paper reviews panel unit root and cointegration tests in the context of PPP. It highlights various drawbacks of existing methods. First, unit root tests suffer from severe size distortions in the presence of negative moving average errors. Second, the common demeaning procedure to correct...

This paper re-assesses the panel (unit root test) evidence for PPP on four monthly data sets. We discuss and illustrate that commonly-used first generation panel unit root tests are inappropriate for PPP analysis since they are constructed for cross-sectionally uncorrelated panels. Given that...

This paper reviews alternative approaches to measuring an economy´s cost competitiveness and proposes some new measures derived from the economic theory of index numbers. The indices provide a theoretical benchmark for estimated real effective exchange rates, but differ from standard measures...

El presente trabajo pretende evaluar el comportamiento del tipo de cambio real de equilibrio a través de sus fundamentos (Términos de intercambios, activos externos netos, grado de apertura comercial, flujo de capitales y tasa de interés internacional), y así poder determinar el grado de...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the wage, price and unemployment dynamics that have taken place in Spain during the last two decades. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the impact of the European economic integration process on Spanish labour market and the convergence...

This study explores a new modelling approach that bridges the gap between multilateral country-level data and the bilateral-model based, goods-market specific purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis. Under this approach, PPP is embedded in latent common factors, extractable from a large set of...