This paper examines optimal monetary policy in an open-economy two-country model with sticky prices. We show that currency misalignments are inefficient and lower world welfare. We find that optimal policy must target not only inflation and the output gap, but also the currency misalignment....

Firms sometimes write price lists or catalogs for their exports, so they set prices for a period of time and do not adjust prices during that interval in response to changes in their environment. The firm sets the price either in its own currency or the importer's currency. This paper draws a...

When equity prices are determined as the discounted sum of current and expected future dividends, Shiller (1981) and LeRoy and Porter (1981) derived a relationship between the variance of the price of equities, p(t), and the variance of the ex post realized discounted sum of current and future...

Nominal exchange rate changes can lead to 'expenditure switching' when they change relative international prices. A traditional argument for flexible nominal exchange rates posits that when prices are sticky in producers' currencies, nominal exchange rate movements can change relative prices...

The traditional case for flexibility in nominal exchange rates assumes that there is nominal price stickiness that prevents relative prices from adjusting in response to real shocks. When prices are sticky in producers' currencies, nominal exchange rate changes can achieve the relative price...

This paper examines optimal exchange-rate policy in two-country sticky-price general equilibrium models in which households and firms optimize over an infinite horizon in an environment of uncertainty. The models are in the vein of the new open-economy macroeconomics' as exemplified by Obstfeld...

Economic agents undertake actions to protect themselves from the short-run impact of foreign exchange rate fluctuations: Nominal goods prices are set in consumers' currencies, and firms hedge foreign exchange risk. A model is presented here which shows that these features of the economy can lead...

Recent tests using long data series find evidence in favor of long-run PPP (by rejecting either the null hypothesis of unit roots in real exchange rates or the null of no cointegration between nominal exchange rates and relative prices.) These tests may have reached the wrong conclusion. Monte...

This study measures the proportion of U.S. real exchange rate movements that can be accounted for by movements in the relative prices of non-traded goods. The decomposition is done at all possible horizons that the data allow -- from one month up to thirty years. The accounting is performed with...

Forward exchange rate unbiasedness is rejected in tests from the current floating exchange rate era. This paper surveys advances in this area since the publication of Hodrick's (1987) survey. It documents that the change in the future exchange rate is generally negatively related to the forward...