House prices have risen rapidly in most advanced economies. This paper examines to which extent house prices have affected rental markets in 9 advanced economies. The analysis reveals that the short-term pass-through of house prices to rents is typically limited: ceteris paribus, a 10% increase...

The present paper is intended to make a modest contribution to an under-standing of one small but important link in this complicated chain of interacting factors. It is a link that has often been ignored because strong simplifying assumptions have until very recently usually been made about it....

The response of import prices to exchange rates can be used to predict the effect of changes in trade policy. The hypothesis of symmetric pass-through of tariffs and exchange rates asserts that the effect of tariffs and exchange rates on prices are identical. This paper examines whether the...

We study exchange rate pass-through (ERPT), i.e., the impact of exchange rate movements on inflation, focusing on euro area import prices at a sectorally disaggregated level. Our estimation strategy is based on VAR-X models, thus incorporating both endogenous and exogenous explanatory...

When aiming at price stability, central banks closely monitor exchange rates. Their level is known to influence prices, since many product components are sourced internationally. An RWI study suggests that central bankers should also take the level of uncertainty about future exchange rates into...

We investigate the extent to which the effect of the 2018/2019 US import tariff hikes on US (post-tariff) import prices was offset by the concurrent appreciation of the US dollar and trace the source of the appreciation back to US trade policy itself. The dollar response to trade policy...

Many papers in the recent literature in open economy macroeconomics make different assumptions about the currency in which firms set their export prices when nominal prices must be pre-set. But to date, all of these studies take the currency of price setting as exogenous. This paper sets up a...

In this paper we have constructed a theoretical model in which Asian firms maximize their profit, competing with Japanese and US firms in their markets. The duopoly model is used to determine export prices and volumes in response to the exchange rate fluctuations vis-...-vis the Japanese yen and...

This paper documents the size and timing of the world inter-continental trade boom following the great voyages in the 1490s of Columbus, da Gama and their followers. Indeed, a trade boom followed over the subsequent three centuries. But what was its cause? The conventional wisdom in the world...

Recent studies have used import data to assess the impact of foreign varieties on prices and welfare for a home country. The reliance on import data has a number of limitations. First, these papers rely on goods categories defined by the Harmonized System. Second, they define varieties using the...

Recognizing that inflation of the value of output and its costs of production must be equal, we focus on a cost-based macroeconomic structuralist approach in contrast to micro-oriented monetarist analysis. For decades the import and profit shares of cost have risen, while the wage share has...

Nominal rigidities due to menu costs have become a standard element in closed economy macroeconomic modeling. The 'New Open Economy Macroeconomics' literature has investigated the implications of nominal rigidities in an open economy context and found that the currency in which prices are set...

Firms sometimes write price lists or catalogs for their exports, so they set prices for a period of time and do not adjust prices during that interval in response to changes in their environment. The firm sets the price either in its own currency or the importer's currency. This paper draws a...

Exchange rates and international prices are endogenous – exchange rates influence export prices directly through the costs of intermediate imports, but import price inflation feeds back into the exchange rates indirectly through monetary policy. This paper shows how to quantify the causal...

Developing countries traditionally exhibit passthrough of exchange rate changes that is greater and more rapid than high-income countries, but have experienced a rapid downward trend in recent years in the degree of short-run passthrough, and in the adjustment speed. As a consequence, slow and...

The Chinese liquid natural gas (LNG) import price has been unstable because the stability of LNG import prices is related to changes in the exchange rates. This paper analyzes the pass-through rate of the Chinese Yuan (CNY) and Japanese Yen (JPY) on the Chinese LNG import price. The Time-Varying...

Modern trade models attribute the dispersion of international prices to physical and man-made barriers to trade, to the pricing-to-market by heterogeneous producers and to differences in the quality of output offered by firms. This paper presents a tractable general equilibrium model that...

Recent research has suggested that the antebellum U.S. cotton textile industry would have been wiped out had it not received tariff protection. We reaffirm Taussig's judgment that the U.S. cotton textile industry was largely independent of the tariff by the 1830s. American and British producers...

This paper challenges the common assumption of market segmentation in international trade. To analyze export entry and pricing decisions of firms in integrated vs. segmented markets, we develop a novel tractable approach based on stochastic export costs that allows us to compare firm-level and...

This paper provides first firm-level evidence of the links between income inequality and the patterns of trade and export prices. We identify a theoretical mechanism behind these links, which suggests that a more unequal income distribution leads to higher average prices. We test the theory...

This paper describes the primary framework associating the four principal price indices in the system of economic statistics-the Producer Price Index (PPI), the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and the Export and Import Price Indices (XPI and MPI)-with the macroeconomic value aggregates they...

In this paper we explore in detail the various ways by which the introduction of intermediate imports affects the comparative statics and the dynamics of adjustment in an open economy. The importance of integrating the role of intermediate imports into a theory of macro-economic adjustment...

The purpose of the paper is to measure the potential bias in the U.S. import price index due to the appearance of new product varieties, or new foreign suppliers, and determine the effect of this bias on the estimated income elasticity of import demand. Existing import price indexes are based on...

This paper develops a multi-sector, multi-country model of international trade and profit shifting which embeds imperfect product markets and markups into Eaton and Kortum (2002)'s Ricardian trade model. Within a country, producers in different sectors face different demand elasticities, and...

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...

Antidumping (AD) duties are calculated as the difference between the foreign firm's product price in the export market and some definition of 'normal' or 'fair' value, often the foreign firm's product price in its own market. Additionally, AD laws allow for recalculation of these AD duties over...

Pricing-to-market (PTM) behaviour implies that exporters adjust their prices to the prevailing prices in their export markets. For the importing country, PTM effects can be interpreted as a measure of the stability of domestic prices against foreign price and exchange rate developments. PTM...

This paper investigates the pass-through of external shocks, i.e. oil price shocks, exchange rate shocks, and non-oil import price shocks to euro area inflation at different stages of distribution (import prices, producer prices and consumer prices). The analysis is based on a VAR model that...

Two seemingly unconnected empirical results suggest an intriguing mechanism. First, economic integration helps harmonize prices internationally, with trade being the primary channel (Rogoff 1996, Goldberg and Knetter 1997). Second, monetary union may greatly increase the amount of trade among...

This paper uses a model of import prices whereby exporters to the euro area set export prices partly as a mark-up on their production costs (i.e., the degree of exchange rate pass-through) and partly in line with euro area producer prices (i.e., pricing-to-market). Using both time series and...

We study the effects on the optimal monetary policy design problem of allowing for deviations from the law of one price in import goods prices. We reach three basic results. First, we show that incomplete pass-through renders the analysis of monetary policy of an open economy fundamentally...

Nominal rigidities due to menu costs have become a standard element in closed economy macroeconomic modeling. The "New Open Economy Macroeconomics" literature has investigated the implications of nominal rigidities in an open economy context and found that the currency in which prices are set...

This paper investigates price-setting for truly homogenous products sold in markets without any formal trade barriers. We use data from IKEA, a furniture company selling identical products in an identical shopping environment in different EU countries. We get four remarkable outcomes: 1) The law...

Gas exports to the Continent are regulated by long term take-or-pay contracts. The contracts are described and analyzed. We thereafter examine whether the most central European gas market, the German market, is integrated. Are there substantial price differences between gas from different export...

The traditional way of assessing the impact of currency depreciation on the trade balance has been to estimate the elasticity of trade volume to relative prices. To this end, most previous studies used aggregate trade data. To shy away from problems associated with using aggregate data, recent...

We investigate theoretically and empirically how exporters adjust their markups across destinations depending on bilateral distance, tariffs, and the quality of their exports. Under the assumption that trade costs are both ad valorem and per unit, our model predicts that markups rise with...

We investigate theoretically and empirically how exporters adjust their markups across destinations depending on bilateral distance, tariffs, and the quality of their exports. Under the assumption that trade costs are both ad valorem and per unit, our model predicts that markups rise with...