This paper aims to highlight key limitations of “The Economist” magazine's Big Mac Index (BMI). The Economist markets the BMI as a tool to determine valuation of currencies. This paper shows that the BMI is a misleading measure of currency valuation for economies whose markets are...

The world has a shortage of financial assets. Asset supply is having a hard time keeping up with the global demand for store of value and collateral by households, corporations, governments, insurance companies, and financial intermediaries more broadly. The equilibrium response of asset prices...

The world has a shortage of financial assets. Asset supply is having a hard time keeping up with the global demand for store of value and collateral by households, corporations, governments, insurance companies, and financial intermediaries more broadly. The equilibrium response of asset prices...

Financial contagion and Suden Stops of capital inflows experienced in emerging-markets crises may originate in an explosive mix of lack of policy credibility and world capital market imperfections that afflict emerging economies with national currencies. Hence, this paper argues that abandoning...

Sudden stops seem to create the perfect environment for disinflation, especially when central banks defend the exchange rate by increasing interest rates. We propose a variation of the output gap model that incorporates the sudden stop shock. The use of the model in policy analysis shows that...

This paper presents a flexible-price small open economy model with a peso problem in productivity states. Agents rationally adjust their beliefs about future productivity growth after the arrival of news. A downward revision of expectations triggers a Sudden Stop, together with large declines in...

In this paper, we argue that differences in the cost structures across sectors play an important role in firms' decisions to adjust their prices. We develop a menu-cost model of pricing in which retail firms intermediate trade between producers and consumers. An important facet of our analysis...

In this paper we examine linkages across non-energy commodity price developments by means of a factor-augmented VAR model (FAVAR). From a set of non-energy commodity price series, we extract two factors, which we identify as common trends in metals and a food prices. These factors are included...

The international diffusion of technology plays a key role in stimulating global growth and explaining co-movements of international equity returns. Existing empirical evidence suggests that countries are heterogeneous in their attitude toward innovation: Some countries rely more on technology...