Three current account imbalances - one very large deficit (the United States) and two surpluses (Japan and the Euro area) - are subjected to a minimalist structural interpretation. Though simple, this interpretation enables us to assess how much of each of the imbalances require a real exchange...

This paper investigates the factors explaining exchange market pressures (EMP) and the hoarding and use of international reserves (IR) by emerging markets during the 2000s, as the Great Moderation turned to the 2008-9 global crisis and great recession. According to our results, both financial...

International financial integration has greatly increased the scope for changes in a country's net foreign asset position through the valuation channel of external adjustment, namely capital gains and losses on the country's external assets and liabilities. We examine this valuation channel...

The sizable hoarding of international reserves by several East Asian countries has been frequently attributed to a modern version of monetary mercantilism hoarding international reserves in order to improve competitiveness. From a long-run perspective, manufacturing exporters in East Asia...

This paper investigates the factors explaining exchange market pressures (EMP) and the hoarding and use of international reserves (IR) by emerging markets during the 2000s, as the Great Moderation turned to the 2008-9 global crisis and great recession. According to our results, both financial...

The sizable hoarding of international reserves by several East Asian countries has been frequently attributed to a modern version of monetary mercantilism - hoarding international reserves in order to improve competitiveness. From a long-run perspective, manufacturing exporters in East Asia...

The evidence for a productivity-based explanation for real exchange rate behavior of East Asian currencies is examined. Using sectoral output and employment data, relative prices and relative productivity levels are calculated for China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore,...

The behavior of the dollar/euro exchange rate is modeled using a monetary model of the exchange rate. The econometric analysis is complicated by the short sample span of actual euro data available for analysis. Hence, data on a synthetic euro are used. The assumptions underlying the monetary...

The unbiasedness hypothesis

We nowcast world trade using machine learning, distinguishing between tree-based methods (random forest, gradient boosting) and their regression-based counterparts (macroeconomic random forest, linear gradient boosting). While much less used in the literature, the latter are found to outperform...