Based on a broad set of regional aggregated and disaggregated consumer price index (CPI) data from major industrialized countries in Asia, North America and Europe we are examining the role that national borders play for goods market integration. In line with the existing literature we find that...

We use CPI data for U.S. and Canadian cities for 14 categories of consumer prices to examine the nature of the deviations from the law of one price. The distance between cities explains a significant amount of the variation in the prices of similar goods in different cities. But the variation of...

We study the quarterly bilateral real exchange rate and the relative price of non-traded to traded goods for 1225 country pairs over 1980-2005. We show that the two variables are positively correlated, but that movements in the relative price measure are smaller than those in the real exchange...

This paper examines the effect of overall and sector-specific productivity shocks on the real exchange rate in small open economies. A dynamic stochastic small open economy model shows that productivity shocks impact the real exchange rate mostly through changes in the relative price of...

We propose that analysis of purchasing power parity (PPP) and the law of one price (LOOP) should explicitly take into account the possibility of "commodity points"--thresholds delineating a region of no central tendency among relative prices, possibly due to lack of perfect arbitrage in the...

I analyze the role of real and monetary shocks on the exchange rate behavior using a structural vector autoregressive model of the US vis-à-vis the rest of the world. The shocks are identified using sign restrictions on the responses of the variables to orthogonal disturbances. These...