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...

David K. Backus is the Heinz Riehl Professor of Finance and Economics at the Stern Business School of New York University. He has published extensively on International Business Cycles as well as on Foreign Exchange Theory. In particular, he teamed with Patrick Kehoe and Finn Kydland to launch...

In many macroeconomic models with rational expectations, optimal policy is time inconsistent, and therefore announced policy may not be credible. This paper models the government's credibility explicitly, using Kreps and Wilson's analysis. Time-consistent optimal government policy emerges as a...

We examine the economy after a regime change, when neither the policy nor the reactions of the public are known. This is an application of Kreps and Wilson's reputation model to Barro and Gordon's macroeconomic policy game. Equilibrium is defined as the dynamically consistent solution to a game...

A vector autoregression is estimated for the U.S. and Canada to elicit the "facts" concerning the exchange rate, money, prices, current account balances and other macro variables. I use a stylized version of Dornbusch's "sticky-price" model for comparison, since interpretation is difficult...

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 examine the behavior of international relative prices from the perspective of dynamic general equilibrium theory, with particular emphasis on the variability of the terms of trade and the relation between the terms of trade and net exports. We highlight aspects of the theory that are critical...

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....