By focusing on the macroeconomic effects of temporary price shocks, this note clarifies the relationships among the terms of trade, the real exchange rate and the current account. This clarification suggests that a real depreciation might prove incapable of bringing the external imbalance back...

During the financial crisis of 2008, the currencies of Latin America faced pressure to devalue— which evoked memories of the “contagious†crises of the 1990s. Yet even between crises, domestic macroeconomic factors can have an impact on a country's exchange market. This study...

One-sector inter-temporal models of the current account predict that a transitory shock to the terms of trade will lead to improvement in trade balance, while a persistent (or permanent) one could result in trade balance deterioration. This paper reexamines this issue in a two-sector small open...

I find that real variables affect the real exchange rate almost entirely through the relative price of traded goods. This finding casts doubt on the theoretical literature that postulates that real shocks propagate only through the relative price of nontraded goods.

Nontraded inputs account for the lion's share of a Big Mac price (Ong 1997, Parsley and Wei 2003). Major departures from Big Mac PPP may then be explained by the Balassa-Samuelson income differences effect, as shown e.g. by Click (1996). But it has been argued that Click''s result is not robust...

A poor country with volatile export prices borrows in international markets. When debt is denominated in foreign currency, there is a temptation to repudiate when export prices are low. Excusable partial defaults reduce this temptation, and help to support lending. The cases of debt denominated...

This paper examines short-run determinants of the U.S. dollar/Malaysian ringgit (USD/MYR) exchange rate based on a simultaneous-equation model. Applying the EGARCH model, the paper finds that the USD/MYR exchange rate is positively associated with the Malaysian real government Treasury bill...

We develop a small open economy model with capital, sticky prices, and a simple form of financial frictions. We compare welfare levels under three alternative rules: a domestic inflation-based Taylor rule, a CPI inflation-based Taylor rule, and an exchange rate peg. We show that the superiority...

This study empirically examines the effects of real exchange rate volatility on India's exports using time series data for the period from 1970-71 to 2011-12. This study uses a simple rolling standard deviation as a measure of exchange rate volatility and implements the Johansen cointegration...

Recent literature has argued that exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) into inflation has been declining following a dramatic change in inflation environment during the 1990s. We formally check this hypothesis for a sample of 12 emerging and developed economies, by making use of a state-space model...