We study the quarterly bilateral real exchange rate and the relative price of non-traded to traded goods for 1225 country pairs over 1980?2005. We show that the two variables are positively correlated, but that movements in the relative price measure are smaller than those in the real exchange...

This paper explores the extent to which the Mexican government's inability to roll over its debt during December 1994 and January 1995 can be modeled as a self-fulfilling debt crisis. In the model there is a crucial interval of debt for which the government, although it finds it optimal to repay...

We extend the analysis of Kiyotaki and Wright, who study an economy in which the different commodities that serve as media of exchange are determined endogenously. Kiyotaki and Wright consider only symmetric, steady-state, pure-strategy equilibria, and find that for some parameter values no such...

A sudden stop of capital flows into a developing country tends to be followed by a rapid switch from trade deficits to surpluses, a depreciation of the real exchange rate, and decreases in output and total factor productivity. Substantial reallocation takes place from the nontraded sector to the...

This paper is a primer on the great depressions methodology developed by Cole and Ohanian (1999, 2007) and Kehoe and Prescott (2002, 2007). We use growth accounting and simple dynamic general equilibrium models to study the depression that occurred in Finland in the early 1990s. We find that the...

Three of the arguments made by Temin (2008) in his review of Great Depressions of the Twentieth Century are demonstrably wrong: that the treatment of the data in the volume is cursory; that the definition of great depressions is too general and, in particular, groups slow growth experiences in...

The worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s was a watershed for both economic thought and economic policymaking. It led to the belief that market economies are inherently unstable and to the revolutionary work of John Maynard Keynes. Its impact on popular economic wisdom is still apparent today....

Economic equilibria are usually solutions to fixed point problems rather than solutions to convex optimization problems. This leads to two difficulties that are closely related: First, equilibria may be difficult to compute. Second, a model economy may have more than one equilibrium. This paper...

In 1985?86 the authors were members of a team that constructed a static applied general equilibrium model that was used to analyze the impact on the Spanish economy of the 1986 fiscal reform, which accompanied Spain?s entry into the European Community. This paper compares the results obtained to...

We propose a methodology for studying changes in bilateral trade due to countries exporting goods that they did not export previously or exported only in small quantities. Applying this methodology to country pairs that undergo trade liberalization and to pairs in which one of the countries...