That international trade flows respond to changes in real exchange rates is beyond question. What is less clear is whether the measurement of real exchange rates matters for characterizing and predicting such responses. To identify the implications of choosing a given measure of the real...

This paper examines the empirical relation between market structure and life expectancy for cartels that were active in international commodity markets throughout this century. I consider two alternative empirical formulations and estimate their parameters recognizing that durability cannot take...

This paper evaluates the distributional properties of forecasts from six econometric models of the U.S. trade account. Using stochastic (Monte Carlo) simulation, we derive confidence intervals and forecast-based test statistics which account for uncertainty from future disturbances and from...

This paper quantifies roughly some potential economic developments in the former Soviet Union (FSU), if substantive economic reforms go forward, and assesses the likely implications of these developments for the rest of the world. It is assumed that a move to world prices for energy and other...

This paper characterizes the statistical distribution of the response of the U.S. trade account to a dollar depreciation. To accomplish this task, the paper builds and estimates an econometric model of U.S. bilateral trade. Given an exchange-rate shock, this distribution is generated empirically...

This paper proposes a tripartite framework of design, evaluation, and post-evaluation analysis for generating and interpreting economic forecasts. This framework's value is illustrated by re-examining mean square forecast errors from dynamic models and nonlinearity biases from empirical...

Virtually all we know about the behavior of U.S. imports rests on studies estimating income and price elasticities with postwar data. But anyone examining the evolution of U.S. trade cannot avoid asking whether the postwar period provides enough information to characterize that behavior. From...

Fifty years of econometric modeling of U.S. import demand assumes that trade elasticities are autonomous parameters, that both cross-price effects and simultaneity biases are absent, and that expenditures on domestic and foreign goods can be studied independently of each other. To relax these...

This paper builds, estimates. and simulates a world trade model to provide a quantitative analysis of the behavior of the U.S. trade deficit. A key feature of this model is that international trade imbalances add up to zero. The analysis estimates income and price elasticities for bilateral...