What is the relationship between interest rates and the exchange rate? The empirical literature in this area has been inconclusive. We use an optimizing model of a small open economy to rationalize the mixed empirical findings. The model has three key margins. First, higher domestic interest...

We propose a new model of exchange rates, which yields a theory of the forward premium puzzle. Our explanation combines two ingredients: the possibility of rare economic disasters, and an asset view of the exchange rate. Our model is frictionless, has complete markets, and works for an arbitrary...

Today's value of the private ECU is driven by expectations that a European monetary authority will at some future date declare itself willing to convert the private ECU into the official basket at par. Until then, its value is not limited by any existing institutional arrangements in the...

Even when the exchange-rate plays no expenditure-switching role, countries may wish to have flexible exchange rates in order to free the domestic interest rate as a stabilization tool. In a setting with nontraded goods, exchange-rate movements may also enhance international risk sharing

We examine the relative predictive power of the sticky price monetary model, uncovered interest parity, and a transformation of net exports and net foreign assets. In addition to bringing Gourinchas and Rey's new approach and more recent data to bear, we implement the Clark and West...

The paper argues that the reason real world fixed exchange rate regimes usually have finite bands instead of completely fixed exchange rates between realignments is that exchange rate bands, counter to the textbook result, give central banks some monetary independence, even with free...

We show analytically that in a rational expectations present value model, an asset price manifests near random walk behavior if fundamentals are I(1) and the factor for discounting future fundamentals is near one. We argue that this result helps explain the well known puzzle that fundamental...

On a Friday that the Fed announces a money supply greater than had been anticipated, interest rates move up in response. Why? One explanation is that the market perceives the fluctuation in the moneystock as an unintended deviation from the Fed's target growth rate that will be reversed in...

The well-known uncovered interest parity puzzle arises from the empirical regularity that, among developed country pairs, the high interest rate country tends to have high expected returns on its short term assets. At the same time, another strand of the literature has documented that high real...

The paper presents and estimates a model of the prices of oil and other storable commodities, a model that can be characterized as reflecting the carry trade. It focuses on speculative factors, here defined as the trade-off between interest rates on the one hand and market participants'...