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Working Paper
Technology Choice and the Long- and Short-Run Armington Elasticity
This paper studies the international transmission of productivity shocks when the Armington elasticity is endogenized through firms' technology choice. With costly adjustment, technology choice allows for a low short-run elasticity and a high long-run elasticity. I provide analytical results which demonstrate how technology choice provides a solution to the Backus-Smith puzzle - the observed negative correlation between relative consumption and the real exchange rate. I then embed technology choice in a quantitative model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and endogenous producer ...
Working Paper
International Asset Markets and Real Exchange Rate Volatility
The real exchange rate is very volatile relative to major macroeconomic aggregates and its correlation with the ratio of domestic over foreign consumption is negative (Backus-Smith puzzle). These two observations constitute a puzzle to standard international macroeconomic theory. This paper develops a two country model with complete asset markets and limited enforcement for international financial contracts that provides a possible explanation of these two puzzles. The model performs better than a standard incomplete markets model with a single non-contingent bond unless very tight borrowing ...
Working Paper
Real Exchange Rates and Primary Commodity Prices: Mussa Meets Backus-Smith
We show that explicitly modeling primary commodities in an otherwise totally standard incomplete markets open economy model can go a long way in explaining the Mussa puzzle and the Backus-Smith puzzle, two of the main puzzles in the international economics literature.