The Feldstein-Horioka finding, that national saving and investment have been highly correlated in the past, has not been primarily due to econometric problems such as endogenous fiscal policy; it has held up equally well when instrumental variables are used. But the inflow of capital to the...

The paper reviews the obstacles to successful international macroeconomic policy coordination, and then offers a proposal for coordination that is designed to have the best chance of overcoming these obstacles: an international version of nominal GNP targeting. There are three sorts of obstacles...

Coordination of macroeconomic policies among countries is not as straightforward in practice as it appears in theory. This paper discusses three obstacles to successful international coordination: (1) uncertainty as to the correct initial position of the economy, (2) uncertainty as to the...

The optimal-diversification model of investors' portfolio behavior can give a linear relationship between the exchange risk premium and the conditional exchange rate variance. This note surveys recent empirical work that allows for the conditional variance itself, and therefore the risk premium,...

A majority of countries neither freely float their currencies nor firmly peg. But most of the remainder in practice also don't obey such well-defined intermediate exchange rate regimes as target zones. This paper proposes to define an intermediate regime, to be called "systematic managed...

After a 30-year absence, calls for international coordination of macroeconomic policy are back. This time the issues go by names like currency wars, taper tantrums, and fiscal compacts. In traditional game theory terms, the existence of spillovers implies that countries are potentially better...

The paper presents and estimates a model of the prices of oil and other storable commodities, a model that can be characterized as reflecting the carry trade. It focuses on speculative factors, here defined as the trade-off between interest rates on the one hand and market participants'...