A puzzle in international macroeconomics is that observed real exchange rates are highly volatile. Standard international real business cycle (IRBC) models cannot reproduce this fact. We show that total factor productivity processes for the United States and the rest of the world are...

Real exchange rates exhibit important low-frequency fluctuations. This makes the analysis of real exchange rates at all frequencies a more sound exercise than the typical business cycle one, which compares actual and simulated data after the Hodrick-Prescott filter is applied to both. A simple...

A central puzzle in international macroeconomics is that observed real exchange rates are highly volatile. Standard International Real Business Cycle (IRBC) models cannot reproduce this fact when calibrated using conventional parameterizations, and can only generate one fourth of the real...

This chapter is structured in three parts. The first part outlines the methodological steps, involving both theoretical and empirical work, for assessing whether an observed allocation of resources across countries is efficient. The second part applies the methodology to the long-run allocation...

I present a dynamic fixed cost model of export participation extended by a capital theoretic concept of the customer stock. Plants that want to start exporting have to invest into a market specific factor which serves as input into a decreasing returns to scale technology generating sales...

To analyze the international transmission of business cycle fluctuations, we propose a new multilevel dynamic factor model with a block structure that (i) does not restrict the factors to being orthogonal and (ii) mixes data sampled at quarterly and monthly frequencies. By means of Monte Carlo...

This paper studies export adjustment to negative shocks in currency unions. I consider the hitherto ignored role of trade costs and taxes in internal devaluations, which have been brought to the fore of international policy during the recent euro periphery crisis. Trade costs can limit the...

This paper is concerned with international reserves. It makes two main points. Firstly, excess reserves cannot be regarded as a substitute for sound fundamentals because the former may destabilize the economic system in the longer term. Secondly, reserve accumulation financed by public debt can...

Recent research has found that current account balances under flexible regimes seem to be no less persistent than under fixed regimes. This result appears to undermine Milton Friedman's well known — and commonly accepted — claim that flexible exchange rates facilitate the adjustment of...

Currency and financial turmoils in international capital markets have been the focus of an extensive theoretical research which started around 30 years ago. This paper provides a synthetic overview of this theoretical modeling. We analyze the basic analytical framework corresponding to the...