That international trade flows respond to changes in real exchange rates is beyond question. What is less clear is whether the measurement of real exchange rates matters for characterizing and predicting such responses. To identify the implications of choosing a given measure of the real...

This paper examines the empirical relation between market structure and life expectancy for cartels that were active in international commodity markets throughout this century. I consider two alternative empirical formulations and estimate their parameters recognizing that durability cannot take...

Though China's share of world trade is comparable to that of Japan, little is known about the response of China's trade to changes in exchange rates. The few estimates available suffer from two limitations. First, the data for trade prices are based on proxies for prices from other countries....

We focus on capturing the increasingly important role that emerging economies play in determining U.S. import prices. Emerging market producers differ from others in two respects: (1) their cost structure is well below that of developed-market producers, and (2) their wide profit margins induce...

This paper evaluates the distributional properties of forecasts from six econometric models of the U.S. trade account. Using stochastic (Monte Carlo) simulation, we derive confidence intervals and forecast-based test statistics which account for uncertainty from future disturbances and from...

This paper quantifies roughly some potential economic developments in the former Soviet Union (FSU), if substantive economic reforms go forward, and assesses the likely implications of these developments for the rest of the world. It is assumed that a move to world prices for energy and other...

Explanations of the persistent deficit in U.S. net exports of goods rest on macroeconomic developments and an asymmetry in elasticities: the income elasticity for imports being larger than the income elasticity for exports. Such macroeconomic developments are not applicable to the equally...

We study whether aggregation residuals in U.S. private investment in information technology (IT) exhibit a predictable pattern that is consistent with Hicks' composite-good theorem and that may be used for forecasting. To determine whether one can extract such a pattern, we apply the...

This paper characterizes the statistical distribution of the response of the U.S. trade account to a dollar depreciation. To accomplish this task, the paper builds and estimates an econometric model of U.S. bilateral trade. Given an exchange-rate shock, this distribution is generated empirically...