This paper examines the effect of international trade on U.S. productivity. We argue that trade can affect domestic productivity through economies-of-scale effects, competition effects, reallocation effects, and spillover effects. We then estimate the net impact of these effects. The results of...

This paper investigates whether the U.S. has become more globalized and if so whether that increased globalization has helped hold down inflation and prolong the current economic expansion. We find that U.S. globalization, which has been rising significantly over the past four decades, surged...

This paper estimates and explains the impact of U.S. sterilized intervention on exchange rate volatility. We find that U.S. intervention reduced both yen/dollar and DM/dollar exchange rate volatilities during 1985-86, but increased them during 1987-89. These results make sense in a noise trading...

The U.S. service surplus soared from near zero in 1985 to about $60 billion in 1992, offsetting about two thirds of the goods trade deficit. Could this merely reflect improvement in data collection? Or does this mean U.S. services industries are more competitive internationally than goods...

Despite the large size of U.S. net financial obligations to foreigners, U. S. residents have continued to earn more income on their assets abroad than foreigners have on their assets in the United States. In other words, the rate of return on U.S.-owned assets abroad is still higher than the...

This paper derives and estimates a current account model from the perspective that the current account balance is the difference between national savings and investment. This approach allows us to include determinants of savings, investment, and capital flows to explain and forecast the...

This paper examines past currency crises to shed light on the likelihood that the adjustment of the U.S. current account deficit will involve a dollar crisis. A currency crisis is narrowly defined to be a depreciation that exceeds a critical threshold, regardless of whether it has an adverse...

Since China began its pro-market reform in 1978, its management of capital flows has followed a cautious learning-by-doing approach, guided by the goal of propelling strong economic growth while minimizing risk to stability. Claiming that the country’s financial infrastructure is still not...

This paper uses a large cross-country panel dataset to estimate models of national saving rates and addresses two related issues. First, to what extent can China’s saving rate be explained by models of saving rates? Second, what are the factors responsible for China’s extraordinarily high...