The Consumption Terms of Trade and Commodity Prices Abstract: Movements in a nation's terms of trade are widely viewed as important for the understanding the sources of business cycle fluctuations, the dynamics of the trade balance and economic welfare. Backus, Kehoe and Kydland (1994) emphasize...

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...

We provide a user's guide to exotic preferences: nonlinear time aggregators, departures from expected utility, preferences over time with known and unknown probabilities, risk-sensitive and robust control, hyperbolic discounting, and preferences over sets (temptations). We apply each to a number...

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 explanationsfor this \conundrum.quot; The most likely, in our view, is a fall in the term premium, probably associated with some combination of...

We explore the practitioners methodology of choosing time-dependent parameters to fit a bond model to selected asset prices, and show that it can lead to systematic mispricing of some assets. The Black-Derman-Toy model, for example, is likely to overprice call options on long bonds when interest...

We provide a useracirc;not;quot;s guide to acirc;not;Sexoticacirc;not;? preferences: nonlinear time aggregators, departures from expected utility, preferences over time with known and unknown probabilities, risk sensitive and robust control, acirc;not;Shyperbolicacirc;not;? discounting, and...

We provide a useracirc;not;quot;s guide to acirc;not;Sexoticacirc;not;? preferences: nonlinear time aggregators, departures from expected utility, preferences over time with known and unknown probabilities, risk sensitive and robust control, acirc;not;Shyperbolicacirc;not;? discounting, and...

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...

The recent rise in the yen has been held out as a quot;solutionquot; to the persistent Japanese trade surplus. I estimate, instead, that the sharp rise in the yen through mid-1993 will lead the trade surplus to fall from a high of 3.7 percent of GNP in late 1992 to about 2.6 percent in 1995....