This paper studies the effect that changing demographic patterns have had on the household saving rate in China. We undertake a quantitative investigation using an overlapping generations (OLG) model where agents live for 85 years. Consumers begin to exercise decision making when they are 18....

We present a model of household life-cycle saving decisions in order to quantify the impact of demographic changes on aggregate household saving rates in Japan, China, and India. The observed age distributions help explain the contrasting saving patterns over time across the three countries. In...

We decompose the response of aggregate consumption to monetary policy shocks into contributions by households at different stages of the life cycle. This decomposition finds that older households have a higher consumption response than younger households. Amongst older households, the...

We employ a model of precautionary saving to study why household saving rates are so high in China and so low in the US. The use of recursive preferences gives a convenient decomposition of saving into precautionary and non precautionary components. This decomposition indicates that over 80...

We study the cross-sectional variation of carry-trade-generated currency excess returns in terms of their exposure to global macroeconomic fundamental risk. The risk factor is the cross-country high-minus-low conditional skewness of the unemployment rate gap. It gives a measure of global...

Using recently developed model selection procedures, we determine that exchange rate returns are driven by a two-factor model. We identify them as a dollar factor and a euro factor. Exchange rates are thus driven by global, US, and Euro-zone stochastic discount factors. The identified factors...

Three potential sources of bias present complications for estimating the half-life of purchasing power parity deviations from panel data. They are the bias associated with inapproiate aggregation across heterogeneous coefficients, time aggregation of commodity prices, and downward bias in...

We study the dynamics of price indices for major U.S. cities using panel econometric methods and find that relative price levels among cities mean revert at an exceptionally slow rate. In a panel of 19 cities from 1918 to 1995, we estimate the half-life of convergence to be approximately nine...

When central banks set nominal interest rates according to an interest rate reaction function, such as the Taylor rule, and the exchange rate is priced by uncovered interest parity, the real exchange rate is determined by expected inflation differentials and output gap differentials. In this...

Can standard business-cycle methodology be applied to China? In this chapter, we address this question by examining the macroeconomic time series and identifying dimensions in which China differs from economies (such as Canada and the U.S.) that are typically the subject of business-cycle...