During emerging market crises, domestic agents might have sufficient collateral to borrow from the other domestic agents, but they are unable to borrow from foreigners because the country, as a whole, lacks international collateral. In this setting, we show that an (ex-post) optimizing central...

This paper borrows the tradition of estimating policy reaction functions from monetary policy literature to ask whether capital controls respond to macroprudential or mercantilist motivations. I explore this question using a novel, weekly dataset on capital control actions in 21 emerging...

This paper considers the general equilibrium relationship between exchange rates and global imbalances. It emphasizes that the exchange rate is not a primitive but an equilibrium price determined by the policy mix. It uses extensions of the two-country Obstfeld-Rogoff model to analyze the...

This working paper was written by Yin-wong Cheung (University of California, Santa Cruz) and XingWang Qian (University of California, Santa Cruz).Motivated by the observed international reserve hoarding behavior in the post-1997 crisis period, we explore the Mrs Machlup’s wardrobe hypothesis...

In this paper we estimate the rate of exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) into UK import prices using disaggregate data at the SITC-2 and SITC-3 digit level. Consistent with earlier studies, we find evidence for significant heterogeneity among the estimated industry-specific pass-through rates. In...

This study measures the proportion of U.S. real exchange rate movements that can be accounted for by movements in the relative prices of non-traded goods. The decomposition is done at all possible horizons that the data allow--from one month up to thirty years. The accounting is performed with...

To what extent do national borders and national currencies impose costs that segment markets across countries? To answer this question the authors use a dataset with product-level retail prices and wholesale costs for a large grocery chain with stores in the United States and Canada. They...

Understanding the effects of exchange rate fluctuations across the population is important for increasingly globalized economies. Previous studies using industry aggregate data have found that industry wages are significantly more responsive than industry employment to exchange rate changes. We...