Relative cross-border retail prices, in a common currency, comove closely with the nominal exchange rate. Using product-level prices and wholesale costs from a grocery chain operating in the United States and Canada, we decompose this variation into relative costs and markup components. The high...

This paper presents dual estimates of total factor productivity growth (TFPG) for East Asian countries. While the dual estimates of TFPG for Korea and Hong Kong are similar to the primal estimates, they exceed the primal estimates by 1 percent a year for Taiwan and by more than 2 percent for...

The positive correlation between real investment rates and real income levels across countries is driven largely by differences in the price of investment relative to output. The high relative price of investment in poor countries is due to the low price of consumption goods in those countries....

We measure the impact of China's decision to open its economy in 1980 on outsourcing from Hong Kong and the relative demand for less-skilled workers. We show that the relative demand for skilled workers in Hong Kong increased at the same time outsourcing to China began to increase. The...

We propose a continuous time model to investigate the impact of inflation credibility on sovereign debt dynamics. At every point in time, an impatient government decides fiscal surplus and inflation, without commitment. Inflation is costly, but reduces the real value of outstanding nominal debt....

We empirically characterize the mechanics of trade adjustment during the Argentine crisis. Though imports collapsed by 70 percent from 2000-2002, the entry and exit of firms or products at the country level played a small role. The within-firm churning of imported inputs, however, played a...

We show, using novel data on currency and prices for US imports, that even conditional on a price change, there is a large difference in the exchange rate pass-through of the average good priced in dollars (25 percent) versus nondollars (95 percent). We document this to be the case across...