A macroeconomic model of international price discrimination

This paper builds a baseline two-country model of real and monetary transmission in the presence of optimal international price discrimination by firms. Distributing traded goods to consumers requires nontradables, making the price elasticity of demand country-specific and a function of the exchange rate. Profit-maximizing monopolistic firms drive a wedge between prices across countries, optimally dampening the response of import and consumer prices to exchange-rate movements. We derive general equilibrium expressions for the pass-through into import and consumer prices, tracing the differential impact of real and monetary shocks on marginal cost and markup fluctuations through the exchange rate.     

Accounting for persistence and volatility of good-level real exchange rates: The role of sticky information

Volatile and persistent real exchange rates are observed not only in aggregate series but also in micro-price data at the retail level. Kehoe and Midrigan (2007) recently showed that, under a standard assumption on nominal price stickiness, empirical frequencies of micro price adjustment cannot replicate the time series properties of the Law of One Price (LOP) deviations. We extend their sticky price model by combining good-specific price adjustment with information stickiness in the sense of Mankiw and Reis (2002). Our framework allows for multiple cities within a country. Using a panel of U.S.-Canadian city pairs, we estimate a dynamic price adjustment process for 165 individual goods. Under a reasonable assumption on the money growth process, we show that the model matches the persistence of the LOP deviation for the median good and accounts for the majority of its volatility when information updates occur every 12 months.     

Oil shocks and external adjustment

We examine the effects of endogenously determined oil price fluctuations in a two-country DSGE model. Under incomplete financial markets, an oil market-specific shock that boosts the oil price results in a wealth transfer toward oil exporters, depresses the oil importer's consumption, and causes the oil importer's real exchange rate to depreciate. Although the oil importer experiences a deterioration in the oil component of its trade balance, an improvement in the nonoil balance substantially dampens the effects on the overall trade balance.     

Exchange rates,money, and relative prices: The dollar-pound in the 1920s

This paper applies the monetary approach to exchange rate determination to the analysis of the monthly dollar/pound exchange rate during the period preceding the return of Britain to gold in 1925. The analytical framework emphasizes that the exchange rate is influenced by real and monetary factors. Special attention is given to the relationship between the exchange rate and the relative price of traded to non-traded goods. The estimated elasticity of the exchange rate with respect to this relative price is shown to be about 0.4 which provides an independent measure of the relative share of spending on non-traded goods.     

Relative price volatility under Sudden Stops: The relevance of balance sheet effects

Sudden Stops are associated with increased volatility in relative prices. We introduce a model based on information acquisition to rationalize this increased volatility. An empirical analysis of the conditional variance of the wholesale price to consumer price ratio using panel ARCH techniques confirms the relevance of Sudden Stops and potential balance sheet effects as key determinants of relative price volatility, where balance sheet effects are captured by the interaction of a proxy for potential changes in the real exchange rate (linked to the degree of external leverage of the absorption of tradable goods) and a measure of domestic liability dollarization.     

State dependent pricing, invoicing currency, and exchange rate pass-through

We analyze exchange rate pass-through and volatility of import prices in a dynamic framework where firms are subject to menu costs and decide on price adjustments in response to exchange rate innovations. The exchange rate pass-through and import price volatility then depend on the invoicing currency in combination with functional forms of cost and demand functions. In particular, there is lower pass-through, less frequent price adjustments, and lower price volatility when prices are set in the importer's currency than when prices are set in the exporter's currency.     

The impact of world oil price shocks on the Canada/U.S. real exchange rate

This article investigates whether and how changes in the world oil price affect the Canada/U.S. real exchange rate. We applied vector autoregression and vector error correction models for the real exchange rate, world oil price, monetary differential, government spending, and productivity differential between the two countries. Our results demonstrate that a surge in the world oil price will lead to an appreciation of the Canadian dollar in the short and long term. Product differentials and U.S. government spending have a negative impact on the Canada/U.S. real exchange rate, and Canadian government spending leads to a depreciation of the Canadian dollar.     

How do fiscal and technology shocks affect real exchange rates?: New evidence for the United States

Using vector autoregressions on U.S. time series relative to an aggregate of industrialized countries, this paper provides new evidence on the dynamic effects of government spending and technology shocks on the real exchange rate and the terms of trade. To achieve identification, we derive robust restrictions on the sign of several impulse responses from a two-country general equilibrium model. We find that both the real exchange rate and the terms of trade—whose responses are left unrestricted—depreciate in response to expansionary government spending shocks and appreciate in response to positive technology shocks.     

国际油价与人民币汇率的非对称溢出效应研究--基于VEC-BEKK-GARCH模型

石油作为重要的战略能源,其价格波动对全球经济的运行和发展会产生极大的影响。为测算国际油价与人民币汇率的均衡关系及非对称溢出效应,选取2008年1月~2019年7月的每日数据,在平稳性检验的基础上,综合运用协整检验和脉冲响应函数等方式,对二者的均值溢出效应进行测量;在VECBEKK-GARCH模型的支撑下,对其非对称波动溢出效应水平进行测算。研究结果表明:国际油价与人民币汇率的协整关系和均值溢出效应处于长期均衡状态;二者的非对称波动溢出效应是双向的,国际油价会随人民币汇率的变化呈现出时变性和持续性特征,而国际油价变动具备持续性特征时,人民币汇率随之产生变化。这种非对称波动溢出效应表明,无论国际油价如何变化,对人民币汇率的冲击都是非对称的。     

Financial liberalization, structural change, and real exchange rate appreciations

The last twenty years have witnessed periods of sustained appreciations of the real exchange rate in emerging economies. The case of Mexico between 1988 and 2002 is representative of several episodes in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe in which countries opening to capital flows experienced large appreciations accompanied by a significant reallocation of workers towards the non-tradable sector. We account for these facts using a two sector dynamic general equilibrium model of a small open economy with frictions to labor reallocation and two driving forces: (i) A decline in the cost of borrowing in foreign markets, and (ii) differential productivity growth across sectors. These two mechanisms account together for 60% of the decline in the domestic relative price of tradables in Mexico and for a large fraction of the observed reallocation of labor across sectors. The decline in the interest rate faced by Mexico in international markets is quantitatively the most important channel. Our results are robust to the inclusion of terms of trade into the model.     

Persistent real exchange rates

Three well known facts that characterize exchange rate data are: (a) the high correlation between bilateral nominal and real exchange rates; (b) the high degree of persistence in real exchange rate movements; and (c) the high volatility of real exchange rates. This paper attempts a joint, albeit partial, rationalization of these facts in an environment with no staggered contracts and where prices are preset for only one quarter. There are two key innovations in the paper. First, we augment a standard two-country open economy model with learning-by-doing in production at the firm level. This induces monopolistically competitive firms to endogeneize the productivity effect of their price setting behavior. Specifically, firms endogenously choose not to adjust prices by the full proportion of a positive monetary shock in order to take advantage of the productivity benefits of higher production. Second, we introduce habits in leisure. This makes the labor supply decision dynamic and adds an additional source of propagation. We show that the calibrated model can quantitatively reproduce significant fractions of the aforementioned facts. Moreover, as in the data, the model also produces a positive correlation between the terms of trade and the nominal exchange rate.     

Who bears the cost of a change in the exchange rate? Pass-through accounting for the case of beer

Nominal exchange rates are remarkably volatile. They ordinarily appear disconnected from the fundamentals of the economies whose currencies they price. These facts make up a classic puzzle about the international economy. If prices do not respond fully to changes in the nominal exchange rate, who bears the cost of such large and unpredictable changes: foreign firms, domestic firms, or domestic consumers? This study presents a new analysis of the sources of incomplete pass-through and then uses this analysis to re-examine its implications for social welfare. I develop and estimate a structural model that analyzes the sources of local-currency price stability for a particular industry. The model enables counterfactual simulations that quantify the relative importance of firms' local-cost components and markup adjustments in the incomplete transmission of exchange-rate shocks to prices and the effect of the exchange-rate shock on domestic and foreign firms' profits and on consumer surplus. The model is applied to a panel dataset of one industry with retail and wholesale prices for UPC-level products. I find that markup adjustments by manufacturers and the retailer explain roughly half of the incomplete transmission and local-cost components account for the other half. Foreign manufacturers generally bear a greater cost (or reap a greater benefit) following an exchange-rate-induced marginal-cost shock than do domestic consumers, domestic manufacturers, or the domestic retailer.     

Firm and sectoral heterogeneity in markup variability

Many theoretical models assume that the markup of price over marginal costs is the same for all firms in a sector, irrespective of firm size, type, or efficiency. We analyze the distribution of markups for 70 Finnish sectors using a complete dataset, including both manufacturing and services sectors and firms of all sizes. In contrast to the constant markup hypothesis, we find (i) large differences in markups within sectors, (ii) higher markups for small firms and domestic firms, and (iii) greater markup heterogeneity in sectors with low capital-labour ratios and a large number of firms.     

Exchange rate regimes and national price levels

This paper explores the role of exchange rate regimes in explaining deviations from the classic theory of purchasing power parity. Examining a broad panel of countries, I find that developing countries with fixed exchange rate regimes have national price levels that are 20 percent higher than those with flexible regimes. For industrial countries, the relation between regimes and price levels is qualitatively similar but weaker. I investigate several explanations for this pattern, and find that exchange-rate overshooting in floats, inflation inertia in pegs and expansionary policies can explain only 5 percentage points of the observed differences. I also show that even though the observed pattern could be the outcome of a class of open economy models pioneered by Obstfeld and Rogoff, the data provides limited empirical support for the predictions of this model.     

Financial dollarization

We present a portfolio model of financial intermediation in which currency choice is determined by hedging decisions on both sides of a bank’s balance sheet. We show that minimum variance portfolio (MVP) allocations provide a natural benchmark to estimate the scope for dollarization of assets and liabilities (financial dollarization) as a function of macroeconomic uncertainty. Within this benchmark, we find that financial dollarization displays high persistence whenever the expected volatility of the inflation rate remains high in relation to that of the real exchange rate, even after price stabilization has been achieved. The empirical evidence confirms that MVP dollarization approximates financial dollarization closely for a broad sample of countries.     

The forward-looking ability of the real exchange rate and its misalignment to forecast the economic performance and the stock market return

This paper aims to examine whether exchange rates can predict future changes in the stock market return and in the economic performance of a country. On the basis of a revision that incorporates relative stock price and rational expectation in Dornbusch's dynamic Mundell–Fleming model, I present a model that can be used for analysing the forward-looking ability of the real exchange rate. The model builds on the works of Campbell and Shiller (Journal of Political Economy, 95, 1987 and 1062), MacDonald and Taylor (IMF Staff Papers, 40, 1993 and 89) and Engel (American Economic Review, 106, 2016 and 436) which can also be converted into a forward-looking version of real exchange rate misalignment model to investigate whether the deviation of the real exchange rate from its fundamental value would contain an economically significant predictable component on forecasting the future stock price movement and the real output.     

Why is it so difficult to beat the random walk forecast of exchange rates?

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the time series behavior of the real exchange rate is well approximated by a nonlinear, exponential smooth transition autoregressive (ESTAR) model. This nonlinearity helps resolve a number of puzzles concerning the persistence and volatility of real exchange rates. In this paper, we explore whether it may also help resolve the well-known difficulties of exchange rate forecasting. We develop a bootstrap test of the random walk hypothesis of the nominal exchange rate, given ESTAR real exchange rate dynamics. We find strong evidence of predictability at horizons of 2 to 3 years, but not at shorter horizons.     

Endogenous norms in wage and price setting and hysteresis in the real exchange rate

Real exchange rates are often ‘disconnected’ from fundamentals. Mean reversion toward equilibrium operates at a slow pace (if it operates at all), and when inflation is low the real exchange rate tracks closely the nominal exchange rate for prolonged periods of time. Using a simple open economy model, we show that including endogenous norms in wage and price setting in an open economy set‐up can lead to hysteresis in the real exchange rate. For a given set of fundamentals, the real exchange rate may settle down at different equilibria and exchange rate policies are not necessarily neutral in the long‐run.     

Sticky inflation and the real effects of exchange rate-based stabilization

This paper tests the empirical validity of the forward-looking pricing hypothesis using data from four exchange rate based stabilization (ERBS) episodes. It finds that backward-looking components of inflation play an important role in inflation dynamics, in some cases exceeding the importance of forward-looking components. The paper then shows that the presence of empirically relevant degrees of inflation stickiness increases the size of the real exchange rate appreciation predicted by an imperfect credibility model of ERBS. The 12% real appreciation predicted by the sticky inflation model is a 70% improvement over the predictions of the fully forward looking pricing setup, but as in other ERBS models, still falls short of matching the real appreciations observed in practice.     

Interpreting real exchange rate movements in transition countries

Real exchange rate movements in the transition economies during the initial transition period were unusually large by the standards of other economies and periods. Using cross-sectional evidence, this paper documents how real exchange rates were generally misaligned at the onset of the transition and how most of this misalignment was eliminated over a relatively short period. Turning to the time series dimension, the paper shows that estimates from a consensus-type single-equation model of the real exchange rate are well-behaved and provide a good fit for exchange rate movements in the early transition period. The results highlight the role of productivity-driven real exchange rate movements that can be interpreted as reflecting both the impact of the structural transformation process on productivity in the tradables sector per se and the effects of changes in tradables versus non-tradables productivity. Furthermore, the results show that the relationship between productivity and real exchange rates holds both when productivity is increasing and when it is falling.