Comments on Obstfeld and Rogoff's "The Six Major Puzzles in International Macroeconomics: Is There a Common Cause?"

The paper offers comments on Obstfeld and Rogoff (2000). The comments primarily focus on three issues: (a) How do we reconcile the numerical examples of OR, which show quantitatively plausible resolutions to the major puzzles arising from costs of trade, with previous studies that have found trade costs do not get us very far? (b) Does the solution proposed by OR solve the puzzles at the expense of introducing new puzzles? That is, does their solution have counterfactual implications for other economic relationships? (The prime example of what I have in mind here is what OR call the Backus-Smith puzzle'.) (c) Some of the problems connected with points (a) and (b) can be rectified by moving away from the assumption of complete asset markets. But, then, how do we assess how much of the solution to the puzzle is coming from trade costs versus capital-market imperfections?

On the record: making sense of today's globalized economy

A discussion with University of Wisconsin economics professor Charles Engel, a senior fellow of the Dallas Fed's Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute, ranges from the current financial crisis to the unpredictability of exchange rates.Globalization ; Financial crises ; Foreign exchange ; International trade ; Monetary policy

Currency Misalignments and Optimal Monetary Policy: A Reexamination

This paper examines optimal monetary policy in an open-economy two-country world with sticky prices under pricing to market. We show that currency misalignments are inefficient and lower world welfare. We find that optimal policy must target consumer price inflation, the output gap, and the currency misalignment. The paper derives the loss function of a cooperative monetary policymaker and the optimal targeting rules. The model is a modified version of Clarida, Gali, and Gertler (JME, 2002). The key change is that we allow pricing to market or local-currency pricing and consider the policy implications of currency misalignments. (JEL E52, F31, F41)

Tests of CAPM on an International Portfolio of Bonds and Stocks

This paper estimates and tests an international version of the Capital Asset Pricing Model. Investors from the U.S., Germany and Japan choose a portfolio that includes bonds and equities from each of these countries to maximize a function of the mean and variance of returns. Investors in each country evaluate returns in terms of their home currency. The CAPM does have some power in explaining ex ante returns. It predicts fairly large risk premia on the equities, but small ones on bonds. The model is rejected, however, when tested against a more general alternative that allows for more investor heterogeneity than the CAPM.

The Real Effects of Foreign Inflation in the Presence of Currency Substitution

The paper explores optimizing models of small open economies that hold foreign money balances. Particular attention is paid to the impact of foreign inflation on the real exchange rate and other real variables. At first, an environment in which foreign money is the only traded asset is explored. This is compared to a more general setting in which many assets can be traded. The effect of foreign inflation on domestic real variables depends on: 1) the degree to which it causes a substitution out of traded assets as a whole and into non-traded assets, and 2) the change in real returns on the portfolio of traded assets held by domestic residents.

A Model of Foreign Exchange Rate Indetermination

Economic agents undertake actions to protect themselves from the short-run impact of foreign exchange rate fluctuations: Nominal goods prices are set in consumers' currencies, and firms hedge foreign exchange risk. A model is presented here which shows that these features of the economy can lead to indeterminacy in the nominal exchange rate in the short run. There can be noise in the exchange rate, unrelated to any fundamentals, essentially because the short-run fluctuations do not influence any rational agent's behavior. Empirical implications of this sort of noise are explored.

Some New Variance Bounds for Asset Prices

When equity prices are determined as the discounted sum of current and expected future dividends, Shiller (1981) and LeRoy and Porter (1981) derived a relationship between the variance of the price of equities, p(t), and the variance of the ex post realized discounted sum of current and future dividends: p*(t): Var(p*(t))>= Var(p(t)). The literature has long since recognized that this variance bound is valid only when dividends follow a stationary process. Others, notably West (1988), derive variance bounds that apply when dividends are nonstationary. West shows that the variance in innovations in p(t) must be less than the variance of innovations in a forecast of the discounted sum of current and future dividends constructed by the econometrician, p^(t). Here we derive a new variance bound when dividends are stationary or have a unit root, that sheds light on the discussion in the 1980s of the Shiller variance bound: Var(p(t)-p(t-1)) >= Var(p*(t)-p*(t-1))! We also derive a variance bound related to the West bound: Var(p^(t)-p^(t-1)) >= Var(p(t)-p(t-1)).