The beginning of the twentieth century provides a unique opportunity to explore the interaction of rapid technological progress and trade barriers in shaping the worldwide diffusion of a new, highly traded good: the automobile. We scrape historical data on the quantity and value of passenger...

At the aggregate level, the evidence that deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP) are too persistent to be explained solely by nominal rigidities has long been a puzzle (Rogoff, 1996). Another puzzle from the micro price evidence of the law of one price (LOP), which is the basic building...

State and local governments throughout the United States attempted to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 using stay-at-home orders to limit social interactions and mobility. We study the economic impact of these orders and their optimal implementation in a fiscal union. Using an event study...

Long-run asset-pricing restrictions in a macro term-structure model identify discretionary monetary policy separately from a policy rule. We find that policy discretion is an important contributor to aggregate risk. In addition, discretionary easing coincides with good news about the...

The combination of substantial terms of trade variability and unstable correlation patterns of trade prices with output and trade volumes has led some to suggest a break in the link between trade volumes and prices. We find that oil accounts for much of the variation in the terms of trade over...

I examine the evolution of the Japanese trade balance and its relation to the terms of trade and the value of the yen. Using a vector time series model, I predict that the trade surplus will fall from a high of 3.7 percent of GNP in late 1992 to about 2.6 percent in 1995. This relatively modest...

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...

High interest rate currencies tend to appreciate. This is the uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) puzzle. It is primarily a statement about short-term interest rates and how they are related to exchange rates. Short-term interest rates are strongly affected by monetary policy. The UIP puzzle,...

From 2004 to 2006, the FOMC raised the target federal funds rate by 4.25%, yet long-maturity yields and forward rates fell. We consider several possible explanations for this "conundrum." The most likely, in our view, is a fall in the term premium, probably associated with some combination of...

Prices of riskfree bonds in any arbitrage-free environment are governed by a pricing kernel: given a kernel, we can compute prices of bonds of any maturity we like. We use observed prices of multi-period bonds to estimate, in a log-linear theoretical setting, the pricing kernel that gave rise to...