This paper explores the main channels of international transmission of economic disturbances under the Bretton Woods System and presents evidence on the short-run international transmission of inflation under that system. There appears to have been little short-run international transmission of...

This paper proposes a new explanation for the greater variability of real exchange rates under pegged than under floating nominal exchange rate systems. The explanation hinges on the propensity of governments to use international trade restrictions and financial restrictions for...

A class of real business cycle models suggests that shocks to technology can explain aggregate fluctuations in output and employment. This paper begins from the premise that shocks to productivity may vary across industries but are unlikely to vary systematically across national boundaries for a...

Manufacturers' finished goods inventories move less than shipments over the business cycle. We argue that this requires marginal cost to be more procyclical than is conventionally measured. We construct, for six manufacturing industries, alternative measures of marginal cost that attribute...

We review evidence on the Great Moderation in conjunction with evidence about volatility trends at the micro level. We combine the two types of evidence to develop a tentative story for important components of the aggregate volatility decline and its consequences. The key ingredients are...

Empirical evidence suggests that banks playa unique role in the savings-investment process, affecting firms' cost of capital and the level of investment. We argue that bank uniqueness is related to how the design of bank loan contracts allows banks to affect borrowers' choice of project risk....

This paper examines the effects of restrictions on international financial markets. We analyze a general equilibrium, rational expectations model of a two-country world in which well-functioning international financial markets premit trade in all state-contingent securities except insofar as...

This paper incorporates international capital flows into a two-country, monetary-general-equilibrium model of asset prices with investment and production. We use the model to calculate theoretical covariances between investment, the current account, the exchange rate, and the terms of...

The paper examines a simple model in which exogenous political risk creates uncertainty about tariffs. The model predicts a relation between consumption and tariffs that differs radically from that implied by models without asset markets or political risk. Given the probability distribution of...

This paper demonstrates that disturbances to supplies or demands for internationally traded goods affect exchange-rates differently than do disturbances in markets for nontraded goods. The paper develops a stochastic two-country equilibrium model of exchange rates, asset prices, and goods...