Import competition from China is pervasive in the sense that for many good categories, the competitive environment that US firms face in these markets is strongly driven by the prices of Chinese imports, and so is their pricing decision. This paper quantifies the effect of the...

This paper provides an overview of the analysis of the term structure of interest rates with a special emphasis on recent developments at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance. The topic is important to investors and also to policymakers, who wish to extract macroeconomic expectations...

This paper presents a theory of the monetary transmission mechanism in a monetary version of Farmer’s (2009) model in which there are multiple equilibrium unemployment rates. The model has two equations in common with the new-Keynesian model; the optimizing IS curve and the policy rule. It...

Periods of high indebtedness have historically been associated with a rising incidence of default or restructuring of public and private debts. Sometimes the debt restructuring is more subtle and takes the form of 'financial repression'. Consistent negative real interest rates are equivalent to...

In contrast to earlier recessions, the monetary regimes of many small economies have not changed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. This is due in part to the fact that many small economies continue to use hard exchange rate fixes, a reasonably durable regime. However, most of the...

Firms employ a rich variety of pricing strategies whose implications for aggregate price dynamics often diverge. This situation poses a challenge for macroeconomists interested in bridging micro and macro price stickiness. In responding to this challenge, we note that differences in macro price...

Some observers argue that increased real integration has led to greater co-movement of prices internationally. We examine the evidence for cross-border price spillovers among economies participating in the pan-Asian cross-border production networks. Starting with country-level data, we find that...

Since the onset of the great recession in peripheral Europe, nominal hourly wages have not fallen much from the high levels they had reached during the boom years in spite of widespread increases in unemployment. This observation evokes a well-known narrative in which nominal downward wage...

Central banks throughout the world predict inflation with new-Keynesian models where, after a shock, the unemployment rate returns to its so called 'natural rate’. That assumption is called the Natural Rate Hypothesis (NRH). This paper reviews a body of work, published over the last decade,...

U.S. retail food price increases in recent years may seem large in nominal terms, but after adjusting for inflation have been quite modest even after the change in U.S. biofuel policies in 2006. In contrast, increases in the real prices of corn, soybeans, wheat and rice received by U.S. farmers...