“Nominal Shocks and Real Exchange Rates: Evidence from Two Centuries,” with Pao-Lin Tien
This paper employs structural vector autoregression methods to examine the contribution of real and nominal shocks to real exchange rate movements using two hundred and seventeen years of data from Britain and the United States. Shocks are identified with long-run restrictions. The long time series makes possible an investigation of how the role of nominal shocks has evolved over time due to changes in the shock processes or to structural changes in the economy which might alter how a shock is transmitted to the real exchange rate. The sample is split at 1913, which is the end of the classical gold standard period, the last of the monetary regimes of the 19th century. The earlier subsample (1795-1913) shows a much stronger role for nominal shocks in explaining real exchange rate movements than the later subsample (1914-2010). Counterfactual analysis shows that the difference between the two periods is mainly due to the size of the nominal shocks rather than structural changes in the economy.
“Current Account Reversals and Structural Change in Developing and Industrialized Countries,” with David R. Hineline
This paper examines the compositional changes that occur in economies experiencing current account reversals using sectoral-level data on output and employment growth around 55 reversal episodes. The experiences of developing and industrialized countries are compared, and the role of currency crises is also examined. Labor market adjustments following reversals is developing countries is shown to differ from that of industrialized economies. The possibility that this difference is related to labor market informality is briefly examined.
“Monetary Rules and Sectoral Unemployment in Open Economies.”
This paper incorporates a search-and-matching model of the labor market into a “New Open Economy Macroeconomics” framework. This allows for an examination of the behavior of tradable and nontradable sector unemployment rates under alternative monetary rules. An examination of dynamics in response to shocks to productivity, world prices and interest rates, and foreign demand suggests that monetary rules that respond to prices of domestic output rather than consumer prices may be better able to stabilize unemployment.
Some research papers are also available via my listings at IDEAS and EconPapers.