In the five years 2011-2015 global trade fell short of expectations to a much larger extent than global GDP. We show that two key features of real trade flows − their high volatility and their procyclicality − are the cause behind the cyclicality of the income elasticity of trade. This...

A country's exchange rate is at the center of economic and political debates on currency wars and trade competitiveness. The real consequences of exchange rate fluctuations depend critically on how firms set prices in international markets. Recent empirical evidence has challenged the dominant...

The real effective exchange rate (REER) is one of the most cited statistical constructs in open-economy macroeconomics. We show that the models used to compute these numbers are not rich enough to allow for the rising importance of global value chains. Moreover, because different sectors within...

We show that an ostensibly disparate set of stylized facts regarding firm pricing behavior can arise in a Ricardian model with Bertrand competition. Generalizing the Bernard, Eaton, Jenson, and Kortum (2003) model allows firms' markups over marginal cost to fall under trade liberalization, but...

Existent literature is by no means conclusive on the effects of trade finance on trade and the economy. We propose a suitable framework to explore the linkages between international trade and finance based on an international real business cycle model where firms require external finance to...

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the relationship between international migration and international trade as well as capital movements. We start out by identifying key issues through a brief comparison between modern migration and the mass migration of the nineteenth century, followed...

The closed and open economy literatures both work on evaluating the role of real rigidities, but in parallel. This paper brings the two literatures together. We use international price data and exchange rate shocks to evaluate the importance of real rigidities in price setting. We show that,...

The Eurozone recent crisis has shown how balance of payments problems in less developed European Monetary Union (EMU) member countries can affect EMU trading partners, spreading the crisis to a larger group of countries. This paper introduces a three-country dynamic general equilibrium model to...

This paper aims to highlight key limitations of “The Economist” magazine's Big Mac Index (BMI). The Economist markets the BMI as a tool to determine valuation of currencies. This paper shows that the BMI is a misleading measure of currency valuation for economies whose markets are...