The paper examines the evolution of U.S. external balances since 1980 and considers various explanations for the persistence of external deficits in the late 1980s and the 1990s. It also offers a general assessment of the medium-term prospects for U.S. current account deficits. The review of...

International patent data for 39 countries from 1970 to 1985 are used to create proxies for imitation and innovation. Domestic imitation and innovation both appear to depend positively on high technology imports from developed countries, intellectual property rights, and the size of the economy....

Dramatic changes are occurring in the nature of international trade. Production processes increasingly involve a sequential, vertical trading chain stretching across many countries, with each country specializing in particular stages of a good's production sequence. We document a key aspect of...

In the last quarter century, wage inequality has increased dramatically in the United States. At the same time, the United States has become more integrated into the world economy, relative prices of final goods have changed, the capital stock has more than doubled, and the labor force has...

The core subjects of trade theory are the pattern and volume of trade: which goods are traded by which countries, and how much of those goods are traded. The first part of this paper discusses evidence on comparative advantage, with an emphasis on carefully connecting theoretical models with...

This paper provides a baseline general-equilibrium model of optimal monetary policy among interdependent economies with monopolistic firms that set prices one period in advance. Strict adherence to inward-looking policy objectives such as the stabilization of domestic output cannot be optimal...

Countries aspiring to join the euro area-the so-called accession countries-are increasingly binding their economic activity, external and internal, to the euro-area countries. This phenomenon is observed in the currency invoicing of international trade transactions, where accession countries...

The growth in the trade share of output is one of the most important features of the world economy since World War II. The growth is generally thought to have been generated by falling tariff barriers worldwide. This thinking, however, does not square with standard static and dynamic...

Recent empirical research finds that pairs of countries with stronger trade linkages tend to have more highly correlated business cycles. We assess whether the standard international business cycle framework can replicate this intuitive result. We employ a three-country model with transportation...

Despite its importance, the microeconomics of the international transmission of shocks is not well understood. The conventional wisdom is that relative price changes are the primary mechanism by which shocks are transmitted across borders. Yet traded-goods prices exhibit significant inertia in...