The paper presents and estimates a model of the prices of oil and other storable commodities, a model that can be characterized as reflecting the carry trade. It focuses on speculative factors, here defined as the trade-off between interest rates on the one hand and market participants'...

By putting together a relatively large data set on bilateral remittances of emigrants, this paper is able to shed light on the important hypothesis of smoothing. The smoothing hypothesis is that remittances are countercyclical with respect to income in the worker's country of origin (the...

This essay considers some prescriptions that are currently popular regarding exchange rate regimes: a general movement toward floating, a general movement toward fixing, or a general movement toward either extreme and away from the middle. The whole spectrum from fixed to floating is covered...

The Feldstein-Horioka finding, that national saving and investment have been highly correlated in the past, has not been primarily due to econometric problems such as endogenous fiscal policy; it has held up equally well when instrumental variables are used. But the inflow of capital to the...

The optimal-diversification model of investors' portfolio behavior can give a linear relationship between the exchange risk premium and the conditional exchange rate variance. This note surveys recent empirical work that allows for the conditional variance itself, and therefore the risk premium,...

This paper makes use of the simulation results of 12 leading large international econometric models, as to the effects of commonly specified changes in monetary and fiscal policy, conducted under the Brookings exercise "Empirical Macroeconomics for Interdependent Economies." The first half of...

This paper tests hypotheses regarding the parameters in investors'asset demand functions. Most important is the hypothesis that federal bonds are closer substitutes for equity than for money; it is associated with the hypothesis of "portfolio crowding out" by federal borrowing. Previous...

What is the effect of trade on a country's environment, for a given level of GDP? Some have observed an apparent positive correlation between openness to trade and measures of environmental quality. But this could be due to endogeneity of trade, rather than causality. This paper uses exogenous...