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A decomposition of the sources of incomplete cross-border transmission
Despite its importance, the microeconomics of the international transmission of shocks is not well understood. The conventional wisdom is that relative price changes are the primary mechanism by which shocks are transmitted across borders. Yet traded-goods prices exhibit significant inertia in the face of shocks such as exchange rate changes. This paper uses a structural model to quantify the relative importance of manufacturers' and retailers' local-cost components and markup adjustments as sources of this incomplete transmission. The model is applied to a panel dataset of one industry with ...
Report
Who bears the cost of a change in the exchange rate? The case of imported beer
This paper quantifies the welfare effects of a change in the nominal exchange rate using the example of the beer market. I estimate a structural econometric model that makes it possible to compute manufacturers' and retailers' pass-through of a nominal exchange-rate change, without observing wholesale prices or firms' marginal costs. I conduct counterfactual experiments to quantify how the change affects domestic and foreign firms' profits and domestic consumer welfare. The counterfactual experiments show that foreign manufacturers bear more of the cost of an exchange-rate change than do ...
Journal Article
Eclipse of visual education
Journal Article
Are we investing too little?
One of the most disappointing features of U.S. economic performance over the past 20 years has been the slowing of growth in productivity and, as a result, in real incomes. For many, the explanation can be found in the low U.S. saving rate. Since the mid 1980s, national saving has averaged just over 15 percent of GDP, compared to more than 20 percent during the 1970s. Thus, one plausible explanation for slow productivity growth, at least in recent years, could be that our low saving rate is constraining investment and thereby depriving the nation of both the tools and the technologies that ...
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Global bond risk premiums
This paper examines time-varying measures of term premiums across ten developed economies. It shows that a single factor accounts for most of the variation in expected excess returns over time, across the maturity spectrum, and across countries. I construct a global return forecasting factor that is a GDP-weighted average of each country?s local return forecasting factor and show that it has information not spanned by the traditional level, slope, curvature factors of the term structure, or by the local return forecasting factors. Including the global forecasting factor in the model produces ...
Report
Arm's-length transactions as a source of incomplete cross-border transmission: the case of autos
A growing share of international trade occurs through intra-firm transactions-those between domestic and foreign subsidiaries of a multinational firm. The difficulties associated with writing and enforcing a vertical contract compound when a product must cross a national border, and may explain the high rate of multinational trade across such borders. We show that this common cross-border organization of the firm may have implications for the well-documented incomplete transmission of shocks across borders. We present new evidence of a positive relationship between an industry's share of ...
Report
A framework for identifying the sources of local currency price stability with an empirical application
The inertia of traded goods' local currency prices in the face of exchange rate changes is a well-documented phenomenon in the field of international economics. This paper develops a framework for identifying the sources of local currency price stability. The empirical approach exploits manufacturers' and retailers' first-order conditions, in conjunction with detailed information on the frequency of price adjustments in response to exchange rate changes, to quantify the relative importance of fixed costs of repricing, local-cost nontraded components, and markup adjustment by manufacturers and ...
Journal Article
Inflation, asset markets, and economic stabilization: lessons from Asia
In 1980's, a new convention emerged in the economics profession - that central banks' primary, even sole, responsibility should be controlling consumer price inflation. By the 1990's, this view was gaining credibility in policy circles, and various countries mandated that their central banks make inflation their primary focus (generally with and escape clause in the event of a severe economic shock). Here in the United States, this orthodoxy never gained official status; rather, the U.S. policy goal remains promoting stable long-term growth using a variety of theoretical approaches. ; The ...
Report
How rigid are producer prices?
Conventional wisdom suggests that producer prices are more rigid than consumer prices and therefore play less of a role in the allocation of goods and services. Analyzing 1987-2008 microdata collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for the producer price index, we find that producer prices for finished goods and services in fact exhibit roughly the same rigidity as consumer prices that include sales and substantially less rigidity than consumer prices that exclude them. Moreover, large firms change prices two to three times more frequently than small firms do, and by smaller amounts, ...