Real exchange rates between the yen and dollar based on general price indexes overestimate the competitiveness of the United States relative to Japan. High productivity growth in the traded sector of the Japanese economy results in a continuous fall in the prices of traded goods relative to...

Two explanations are given for why nominal or real returns differ across currencies: foreign exchange risk premia and systematic (rational) forecast errors. This study reexamines three parity conditions in international finance, uncovered interest parity, purchasing power parity, and real...

This paper investigates the importance of markup behavior in Japanese manufacturing. According to the evidence presented, Japanese firms have varied the markups of prices over marginal costs in order to limit the effects of exchange rate changes on output. This behavior is quite different from...

Relative price changes in Japanese and U.S. manufacturing are driven by two forces, productiviry growth which leads to secular changes in costs and exchange rate fluctuations which change relative prices between the two countries. In sectors where productivity growth is high, reductions in costs...

A firm is subject to `economic exposure' if changes in exchange rates affect the firm's value, as measured by the present value of its future cash flows. This paper shows that in many forms of competition, including the most commonly studied case of monopoly, the economic exposure of an...

This paper considers two alternative approaches to stabilizing an economy with firm-specific productivity disturbances. The first uses wage contracts tying wages in each firm to these disturbances as well as the price level. The second uses a tax on firms which modifies their supply behavior...

The Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 which fixed exchange rates for over twenty-five years is often cited as a model of economic cooperation among countries. Yet over fifteen years have elapsed since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods System without any serious efforts to restore fixed exchange...

How does a firm in one country evaluate an investment in a firm in another country, or how does it evaluate a foreign project that the firm itself is undertaking? The firm must estimate future free cash flows just as in a domestic project, but choosing an appropriate discount rate is a...

This paper examines evidence on interest differentials under the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates and under the flexible rate system which succeeded it. Under the Bretton Woods system, many countries resorted to capital controls in an attempt to pursue independent monetary policies....

This paper investigates pricing by Japanese manufacturing firms in export and domestic markets. The paper reports equations explaining the margin between export prices in yen and domestic prices for a wide range of final goods including many of the electronic and transport products which have...