Search Results
Working Paper
Regional patterns in the law of one price: the roles of geography vs. currencies
We find evidence that the law of one price (LOOP) holds more nearly for country pairs that are within geographic regions than for country pairs that are not. These findings are established using consumer price data from 23 countries (including data from eight North American cities.) We find that failures of LOOP are closely related to nominal exchange rate variability, suggesting a link to sticky nominal prices. We also find that distance can explain failures of LOOP, suggesting the failures arise from imperfect market integration. However, these two sources do not explain all of the failures ...
Working Paper
Long-term evidence on the Tobin and Fisher effects: a new approach
Using a new approach, we reexamine the empirical evidence on the long-term interactions between inflation and real variables. We find, using over 100 years of U.S. data, that in the long run the effect of inflation on investment and output is positive (a "Tobin type effect") and the investment rate, and hence the real interest rate, are not independent of inflation. However, over the full sample at least, the variability of the innovations to the stochastic inflation trend is small relative to the variability of the innovations to the productivity and fiscal trends. We conclude that models ...
Working Paper
Political competition, causal relationships between taxes and spending, and their influence on government size: evidence from state-level data
Theories of fiscal illusion and political competition have different implications for (i) the causal relationships between taxes and spending, and (ii) government size. These are tested using data from u.s. states from 1950 to 1990. We find evidence that greater political competition generally encourages bigger government, the Democratic Party is associated with bigger government, and state governments which "tax first, spend later" are more likely to be large. Other factors related to the fiscal illusion and political competition theories also appear to be important determinants of ...
Working Paper
Exchange rate forecasting: the errors we've really made
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 alternative. The resulting "time series" of forecast performance indicates that both data revisions and changes in the sample period typically have large effects on exchange rate predictability. We show that the favorable evidence of long-horizon exchange rate predictability for the DM and Yen in Mark ...
Working Paper
Real exchange rate movements in high inflation countries
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. We then estimate two alternative extensions. In the first, we decompose the output shock into supply and demand disturbances; in the second, the monetary shock is further decomposed into money supply and nominal exchange rate disturbances. Monetary shocks are found to be generally significant. Real ...
Working Paper
Deviations from purchasing power parity: causes and welfare costs
We explore deviations from short-run purchasing power parity across European cities, attempting to move beyond a "first-generation" of papers that document very large border effects. We document two very distinct types of border effects embedded in relative prices. The first is a "real barriers effect," caused by various barriers to market integration. The second is a sticky-consumer-price cum volatile exchange-rate effect. Both are shown to be important empirically, the second type especially so. We argue that the two effects are very different from each other. For the first type of ...
Working Paper
Violating the law of one price: should we make a federal case out of it?
We use new disaggregated data on consumer prices to determine why there is variability in prices of similar goods across U.S. cities. We address questions similar to those that have arisen in the international context: is this variability purely a result of market segmentation or do sticky nominal prices play a role? We also examine how the degree of tradability of a good influences price variability. Surprisingly, we find that variability is larger for traded goods. We attribute this finding to greater price stickiness for non-traded goods. Distance between cities accounts for a significant ...
Discussion Paper
Measuring Monetary Policy Uncertainty: The Federal Reserve, January 1985-January 2016
In this note we focus on the U.S. over the period January 1985 to January 2016, but have also constructed measures over a longer time period and for other central banks/economies.
Working Paper
How wide is the border?
Failures of the law of one price explain much of the variation in real C.P.I. exchange rates. We use C.P.I. data for U.S. cities and Canadian cities for 14 categories of consumer prices to examine the nature of the deviations from the law of one price. The distance between cities explains a significant amount of the variation in the prices of similar goods in different cities. But, the variation of the price is much higher for two cities located in different countries than for two equidistant cities in the same country. By our most conservative measure, crossing the border adds as much to the ...