We study the role of distance and time in statistically explaining price dispersion for 14 commodities from 1732 to 1860. The prices are reported for US cities and Swedish market towns, so we can compare international and intranational dispersion. Distance and commodity-specific fixed effects...

Using US micro price data at the city level, we provide evidence that both the volatility and the persistence of deviations from the law of one price (LOP) are rising in the distance between US cities. A standard, two-city, stochastic equilibrium model with trade costs can predict the...

Economic research into the causes of business cycles in small open economies is almost always undertaken using a partial equilibrium model. This approach is characterized by two key assumptions. The first is that the world interest rate is unaffected by economic developments in the small open...

This investigation aims to explain and quantify the deviations of the Taylor Rule. A novel three-step econometric procedure designed to reflect the data-rich environment in which central banks operate is proposed using information for 229 macroeconomic series. This procedure can be applied to...

In modelling macroeconomic time series, often a monthly indicator of global real economic activity is used. We propose a new indicator, named World steel production, and compare it to other existing indicators, precisely the Kilian’s index of global real economic activity and the index of OECD...

This paper investigates the short-run effects of economic growth on carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels and the manufacture of cement for 189 countries over the period 1961–2010. Contrary to what has previously been reported, we conclude that there is no strong...

In this study, we argue that the conventional intra-industry trade (IIT) index does not directly address the quality issue and propose a methodology to make full use of unit-price gap information to deduce quality differences between simultaneously exported and imported products. By applying...

No-arbitrage implies a close link between exchange rates and interest returns, but evidence of that link has been elusive. This paper derives an exchange rate asset price model with consumption-risk adjustments. Interest rates and exchange rates reflect common risks which bias their reduced-form...

We document how firm-specific volatility in sales, earnings and employment growth evolved year by year in Japan. Our volatility measure also indicates the evolution of firm turnover. We find that patterns in firm-specific volatility have changed when macroeconomic circumstances have. Firm...

This paper explores the hypothesis that the sources of economic and financial crises differ from non-crisis business cycle fluctuations. We employ Markov-switching Bayesian vector autoregressions (MS-BVARs) to gather evidence about the hypothesis on a long annual U.S. sample running from 1890 to...