Many papers in the recent literature in open economy macroeconomics make different assumptions about the currency in which firms set their export prices when nominal prices must be pre-set. But to date, all of these studies take the currency of price setting as exogenous. This paper sets up a...

The purchasing power parity puzzle relates to the adjustment of real exchange rates. Real exchange rates are extremely volatile, suggesting that temporary shocks emanate from the monetary sector. But the half-life of real exchange rate deviations is extremely large -- 2.5 to 5 years. This...

This paper examines optimal exchange-rate policy in two-country sticky-price general equilibrium models in which households and firms optimize over an infinite horizon in an environment of uncertainty. The models are in the vein of the new open-economy macroeconomics' as exemplified by Obstfeld...

This paper characterizes the integration patterns of international currency unions (such as the CFA Franc zone and the East Caribbean Currency Area). We empirically explore different features of currency unions, and compare them both to countries with sovereign monies, and to regions within...

This paper develops a welfare-based model of monetary policy in an open economy. We focus on the extent to which monetary policy should be employed in maintaining the exchange rate. The traditional approach maintains that exchange rate flexibility is desirable in the presence of real...

This paper explores the implications of the European single currency within a simple sticky price intertemporal model. The main issue we focus on is how the euro may alter the responsiveness of consumer prices to exchange rate changes. Our central conjectures is that the acceptance of the euro...

This paper investigates the behavior of the foreign exchange risk premium in two recent two-country intertemporal-optimizing general equilibrium models with sticky nominal prices: Obstfeld-Rogoff (1998) and Devereux-Engel (1998). The foreign exchange risk premium in any general equilibrium model...

We investigate the choice of exchange-rate regime fixed or floating in a dynamic, intertemporal general equilibrium framework. Our framework extends Devereux and Engel (1998) by investigating the implications of internationalized production. We examine the role of price-setting -- whether prices...

We find evidence that the law of one price (LOOP) holds more nearly for country pairs that are within geographic regions than for country pairs that are not. These findings are established using disaggregated consumer price data from 23 countries (including data from eight North American...