Countries that specialize in commodity exports often exhibit a correlation between the relevant commodity price and the value of their currency. We explore a natural but little-studied explanation for this correlation. An increase in the commodity price leads to increases in the future values of...

The discrete choice to adopt a financial innovation affects a household's exposure to inflation and transactions costs. We model this adoption decision as being subject to an unobserved cost. Estimating the cost requires a dynamic structural model, to which we apply a conditional choice...

We review research using departures from the law of one price to measure the advent of globalization in Europe and Asia. In an application, we then study the role of distance and time in statistically explaining price dispersion across 32 Swedish towns for 19 commodities from 1732 to 1914. The...

An SVAR in US federal spending, federal revenue, and GDP is a standard setting for the study of the impact of fiscal shocks. An appealing feature of identifying a fiscal shock with an external instrument is that one can find the effects of that shock without fully identifying the SVAR. But we...

Historians have suggested there were waves of inflation or price revolutions in the UK (and earlier England) in the 13th, 16th, and 18th centuries, prior to the ongoing inflation since 1914. We study retail price inflation since 1251 and model its forecasts. The model is an AR(n) but allows for...

Countries that specialize in commodity exports often exhibit a correlation between the relevant commodity price and the value of their currency. We explore a natural but littlestudied explanation for this correlation. An increase in the commodity price leads to increases in the future values of...