This paper builds a two-country model with differential productivity and financial frictions to quantitatively account for the recent increase in the U.S. current account deficit. An influential literature says that as U.S. productivity surged, capital was attracted to the United States to take...

We incorporate trade imbalances into a quantitative model of bilateral trade in manufactures, dividing the world into forty countries. Fitting the model to 2004 data on GDP and bilateral trade we calculate how relative wages, real wages, and welfare would differ in a counterfactual world with...

In this paper, we focus on the movements of the yen on Japanese industries, and on the sectoral reallocation of Japanese employment. We show that the appreciation episodes of 1985 and 1995 have significantly hurt the ability of Japanese industries to compete with U.S. industries, by raising the...

An important puzzle in international macroeconomics is the exchange rate disconnect puzzle. Nominal exchange rates seem to be unrelated to other macroeconomic variables, for example, export quantities. This paper uses Japanese firm level data to examine whether exchange rate fluctuations are...

A model of the domestic financial intermediation of foreign capital inflows based on agency costs is developed for studying financial crises in emerging markets. In equilibrium for the model economy, the banking system becomes progressively more fragile under imperfect prudential regulation and...

We will examine the size of the Feldstein and Horioka (1980) "saving-retention coefficient" in a setting of near perfect capital mobility, Japanese regions. We first find that on total regional saving and investment rate data, inclusive of regional government saving and investment, the estimate...

Japanese government planners use the average age of the manufacturing capital stock as one measure of their country's international "competitiveness." Compared to the U.S., the data show that Japanese depreciation rates are higher and that capital stocks are younger. ; In much of economic...