This paper describes the doctrinal foundations of Federal Reserve policy from the establishment of the institution through the early 1930s, focusing on the role of international factors in those doctrines and conceptions. International considerations were at most part of the constellation of...

We study housing dynamics in China using vector autoregressions identified with theoryconsistent sign restrictions. We study five potential drivers: 1) Population increases; 2) a relaxation of credit standards, for example, due to the shadow banking system; 3) increasing preferences towards...

This paper starts from the theoretical observation that simple rules-based monetary policy will result in good economic performance in a globalized world economy and the historical observation that this occurred during the Great Moderation period of the 1980s and 1990s. It tries to answer a...

We investigate intra-safe haven currency behavior during the recent global financial crisis. The currencies we consider are the USD, the JPY, the CHF, the EUR, the GBP, the SEK, and the CAD. We first assess which safe haven currency appreciates the most as market uncertainty increases, i.e. we...

We use network centrality measures to capture the trade partner diversification (TPD) of countries as revealed by their position in the international trade network. These measures are shown to enter long-run growth regressions positively and significantly, on top of trade openness and other...

An independent currency and a flexible exchange rate generally helps a country in adjusting to macroeconomic shocks. But recently in many countries, interest rates have been pushed down close to the lower bound, limiting the ability of policy-makers to accommodate shocks, even in countries with...

What drives US current account imbalances? Is there solid evidence that the behavior of the current account is different during deficits and surpluses or that the size of the imbalance matters? Is there a threshold relationship between the US current account and its main drivers? We estimate a...

Standard New Keynesian models have often neglected temporary sales. In this paper, we ask whether this treatment is appropriate. In the empirical part of the paper, we provide evidence using Japanese scanner data covering the last two decades that the frequency of sales was closely related with...

We analyze how the role of different national currencies as international reserves was affected by the shift from fixed to flexible exchange rates. We extend data on the currency composition of foreign reserves backward and forward to investigate whether there was a shift in the determinants of...

We investigate the link between real exchange rates and sectoral total factor productivity measures for countries in the Eurozone. Real exchange rate patterns closely accord with an amended Balassa-Samuelson interpretation, both in cross-section and time series. We construct a sticky price...