We review recent work comparing properties of international business cycles with those of dynamic general equilibrium models, emphasizing two discrepancies between theory and data that we refer to as anomalies. The first is the consumption/output/productivity anomaly: in the data we generally...

We provide a theoretical interpretation of two features of international data: the countercyclical movements in net exports and the tendency for the trade balance to be negatively correlated with current and future movements in the terms of trade, but positively correlated with past movements....

In models with recursive preferences, endogenous variation in Pareto weights would be interpreted as wedges from the perspective of a frictionless model with additive preferences. We describe the behavior of the (relative) Pareto weight in a two-country world and explore its interaction with...

We consider the causes of international capital flows. Since capital flows are extremely persistent, we argue that their drivers must be persistent, too. We think the most compelling candidates are demographic trends, tfp differences and financial frictions. In this paper we focus primarily on...

Dynamic inconsistency provides a theoretical basis for discussions of policy credibility: when the government cannot commit its future policies, the incentive to deviate from the 'optimal' plan renders it incredible. We derive the best policy in the absence of precommitment as the feedback Nash...

Despite enormous growth in international capital flows, capital-output ratios continue to exhibit substantial heterogeneity across countries. We explore the possibility that taxes, particularly corporate taxes, are a significant source of this heterogeneity. The evidence is mixed. Tax rates...