Nominal exchange rates are remarkably volatile. They ordinarily appear disconnected from the fundamentals of the economies whose currencies they price. These facts make up a classic puzzle about the international economy. If prices do not respond fully to changes in the nominal exchange rate,...

On March 18, 1994, the Eastern Economic Association sponsored a roundtable discussion at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, to examine the future of the international monetary system in light of the aims of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. The title of the roundtable captured the central...

A large share of international trade occurs through intra-firm transactions. We show that this common cross-border organization of the firm has implications for the well-documented incomplete transmission of shocks across such borders. We present new evidence of an inverse relationship between a...

This note outlines conditions under which we can identify a vertical supply model of multiple retailers’ and manufacturers’ oligopoly-pricing behavior. This is an important question particularly when the researcher believes, contrary to the traditional assumption followed in the...

How rigid are producer prices? Conventional wisdom is that producer prices are more rigid than and so play less of an allocative role than do consumer prices. In the 1987-2008 micro data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for the PPI, we find that producer prices for finished goods...

The inertia of the local-currency prices of traded goods in the face of exchange-rate changes is a well-documented phenomenon in International Economics. This paper develops a framework for identifying the sources of local-currency price stability. The empirical approach exploits...