Can indeterminacy and self-fulfilling expectations help explain international business cycles?

We introduce equilibrium indeterminacy into a two-country incomplete asset model with imperfect competition and analyze whether self-fulfilling, belief-driven fluctuations (i.e., sunspot shocks) can help resolve the major puzzles of international business cycles. We find that a combination of productivity and sunspot shocks can account for the observed counter-cyclical behavior in international relative prices and quantities, while simultaneously generating volatilities that match the data. The indeterminacy model can also resolve the Backus-Smith puzzle without requiring a low value of the trade elasticity.