This paper documents large cross-country differences in the long run volatility of the real exchange rate. In particular, it shows that the real exchange rate of developing countries is approximately three times more volatile than the real exchange rate in industrial countries. The paper tests...

This paper presents an identification strategy that allows us to study both the sectoral effects of monetary policy and the role that monetary policy plays in the transmission of sectoral shocks. We apply our methodology to the case of the U.S. and find some significant differences in the...

We estimate the interrelationships among economic institutions, political institutions, openness, and income levels, using identification through heteroskedasticity (IH). We split our cross-national dataset into two sub-samples: (i) colonies versus non-colonies; and (ii) continents aligned on an...

The endogeneity of exchange rates and intervention has long plagued studies of the effectiveness of central banks actions in foreign exchange markets. Researchers have either excluded contemporaneous intervention, so that their explanators are predetermined, or obtained a small, and typically...

The existence of a natural resource curse has been a longstanding theme in the economic literature and in policy discussions. We propose an alternative mechanism and study its policy implications. The mechanism is based on the interaction between two building blocks: specialization in...

The empirical literature on contagion has mainly measured the propagation of shocks across countries using daily stock markets, interest rates, and exchange rates. Several methodologies have been used for this purpose, however, the properties of the data introduces important limitations on the...

The stickiness and currency of pricing of traded goods play a central role in international macroeconomics, however empirical evidence on these features is seriously limited. To address this we use microdata on U.S. import and export prices at-the-dock for the period 1994-2005, and present four...

We show how using censored regressors leads to expansion bias, or estimated effects that are proportionally too large. We show the necessity of this effect in bivariate regression and illustrate the bias using results for normal regressors. We study the bias when there is a censored regressor...

This paper measures the effects of the risk of war on nine U.S. financial variables using a heteroskedasticity-based estimation technique. The results indicate that increases in the risk of war cause declines in Treasury yields and equity prices, a widening of lower-grade corporate spreads, a...

The information that ESG raters produce is valuable. Assessing ESG performance is conceptually challenging because we need to measure contextuality, additionality, and preferences. ESG raters, specialized ESG data providers, and aggregators can harness economies of scale. Regulators should...