The U.S. real effective exchange rate is at its highest level since 1985. In that year, the U.S. and its trading partners coordinated a depreciation of the dollar and the U.S. agreed to reduce its budget deficit. This paper reports that a dollar depreciation today would still improve U.S. trade...

Rogoff predicted that the U.S. dollar will depreciate and that exchange rate volatility will return. The coronavirus crisis has also roiled the world economy. This paper investigates the exposure of French and Korean firm stock returns to exchange rate appreciations and the pandemic. Both France...

The coronavirus crisis has damaged the U.S. economy. This paper uses the stock returns of 125 sectors to investigate its impact. It decomposes returns into components driven by sector-specific factors and by macroeconomic factors. Idiosyncratic factors harmed industries such as airlines,...

South Korea has proven resilient through crises. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Korea has used testing and contact tracing to keep the number of cases per capita far below those in the U.S. and Europe. This paper uses sectoral stock returns to gauge the impact of the pandemic on the Korean...

Inflation remained quiescent for several decades and then surged in 2021 and 2022. Inflation subsequently fell in 2023 and 2024. This paper investigates how the rise and fall in inflation after 2019 affected the U.S. stock market. To do this, it estimates a fully specified multi-factor model...

News of aggressive monetary easing by the Bank of Japan in late 2012 contributed to a 45 percent depreciation of the Japanese yen relative to the U.S. dollar. This paper investigates how the depreciation affected the Japanese economy. Exports responded much less than predicted, especially for...

The Indonesian economy has a long history of steady growth punctuated by times of turmoil and crisis. Recently Indonesia has faced the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, contractionary U.S. monetary policy, and fluctuating commodity prices. To examine how the economy is faring since the pandemic...

Japan exports sophisticated capital goods. Since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), Japanese companies have offshored the production of lower-end goods and parts and components to Asian countries. Because of this, several researchers argued that a weaker yen no longer stimulates machinery...

Inflation in 2021 and 2022 grew much faster than the Federal Reserve expected. The Fed downplayed inflation in 2021 and then increased the federal funds rate by 500 basis points between March 2022 and May 2023. This paper investigates how this unprecedented tightening has impacted the stock...

More complex products are less substitutable in international trade and may therefore have lower price elasticities. We investigate this issue using 960 types of manufactured exports from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to 190 partner economies disaggregated at the Harmonized System...