We analyze retail prices and at-the-dock (import) prices of specific items in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) CPI and IPP databases, using both databases simultaneously to identify items that are identical in description at the dock and when sold at retail. This identification allows us to...

We examine the forecasting performance of standard macro models of exchange rates in real time, using dozens of different vintages of the OECD's Main Economic Indicators database. We calculate out-of-sample forecasts as they would have been made at the time, and compare them to a random walk...

Exchange rates have raised the ire of economists for more than 20 years. The problem is that few, if any, exchange rate models are known to systematically beat a naive random walk in out of sample forecasts. Engel and West (2005) show that these failures can be explained by the standard-present...

Survey data show that the expected growth rates of consumption across countries vary widely and are not highly correlated. This data contradicts the simplest of open-economy models in which there is a freely traded non- state-contingent bond and purchasing power parity holds. We explore two...

While much empirical work has addressed the role of monetary policy shocks in exchange rate behavior, conclusions have been clouded by the lack of plausible identifying assumptions. We apply a recently developed inference procedure allowing us to relax dubious identifying assumptions. This work...

Many recent papers have studied movements in stock, bond, and currency prices over short windows of time around macro announcements. This paper adds to the announcement effects literature in two ways. First, we study the joint announcement effects across a broad range of assets--exchange rates...

There is little consensus concerning the sources of fluctuations in real exchange rates. In this paper I assess the nature of the shocks that drive the real U.S. dollar-U.K. pound exchange rate, analyzing 130 years of data. I first show that wars, which are examples of a (transitory) real shock,...

We reexamine the evidence for border effects in deviations from the law of one price, using data for consumer prices from Canadian and U.S. cities. The study parallels Engel and Rogers (1996), except that this study uses actual price data rather than price index data. We find evidence of border...

This paper presents a general framework to address several issues that have arisen in recent work that investigates purchasing power parity (PPP) and other inter-regional relative price movements: (1) How can we model real exchange rate movements in a consistent manner, so that our model for the...

We empirically assess the sources of fluctuations in the real exchange rates of four high inflation countries, for which monetary shocks are generally believed to be predominant. In a benchmark model we identify fiscal, monetary, and output shocks based on a general-equilibrium optimizing model....