As the Japanese population structure changes, health care and long-term care costs will steadily increase. The current style of financing (pay-as-you-go) will create a large increase in future burden of these costs. This paper studies an alternative policy that prefunds the social insurance...

While the 2008-2009 financial crisis originated in the United States, we witnessed steep declines in output, consumption and investment of similar magnitudes around the globe. This raises two questions. First, given the observed strong home bias in goods and financial markets, what can account...

It is well known that the extent of pass-through of exchange rate changes to consumer prices is much lower than to import prices. One explanation is local distribution costs. Here we consider an alternative, complementary, explanation based on the optimal pricing strategies of firms. We consider...

Empirical evidence shows that macroeconomic fundamentals have little explanatory power for nominal exchange rates. On the other hand, the recent microstructure approach to exchange rates' has shown that most exchange rate volatility at short to medium horizons is related to order flows. This...

It is well known from anecdotal, survey and econometric evidence that the relationship between the exchange rate and macro fundamentals is highly unstable. This could be explained when structural parameters are known and very volatile, neither of which seems plausible. Instead we argue that...

On the eve of a major change in the world monetary system, the adoption of a single currency in Europe, our theoretical understanding of the implications of the exchange rate regime for trade and capital flows is still limited. We argue that two key model ingredients are essential to address...

We develop a new theory of international capital flows based on dispersed information across individual investors. There is extensive evidence of information heterogeneity within and across countries, which has proven critical to understanding asset price behavior. We introduce information...

Interpretations of the home bias puzzle in international finance have fre- quently focused on the role of fluctuations in domestic nontraded output, through their effects on the marginal utility of tradables consumption. This paper assesses the empirical evidence of this aproach, by deriving an...

The uncovered interest rate parity equation is the cornerstone of most models in international macro. However, this equation does not hold empirically since the forward discount, or interest rate differential, is negatively related to the subsequent change in the exchange rate. This forward...

This paper surveys the measurement of trade costs --- what we know, and what we don't know but may usefully attempt to find out. Partial and incomplete data on direct measures of costs go together with inference on implicit costs from trade flows and prices. Total trade costs in rich countries...