Has the dominance of the dollar in global trade rendered monetary policy ineffective? An emerging view contends that if a country invoices its exports in dollars, exchange rates cannot stabilize economic activity, as the classical expenditure-switching channel is muted. This view rests on the premise that export prices are sticky in dollars, breaking the link between export demand and depreciations. But this assumption is not borne out by the data: goods priced in dollars tend to have more flexible prices, along with higher elasticities of substitution. We propose a model with more realistic assumptions and show that even with dollar pricing, depreciating the currency by loosening monetary policy can still boost exports and activity materially. The limit to any expansion is not demand, but supply capacity. We also show that low exchange rate pass-through to dollar prices is not informative about price stickiness. The price response to exchange rates is small when demand elasticities are high, even with flexible prices: low pass-through is an equilibrium result, not evidence of a nominal friction.

A vast empirical literature has documented delayed and persistent effects of monetary policy shocks on output. We show that this finding results from the aggregation of output impulse responses that differ sharply depending on the timing of the shock. When the monetary policy shock takes place in the first two quarters of the year, the response of output is quick, sizable, and dies out at a relatively fast pace. In contrast, output responds very little when the shock takes place in the third or fourth quarter. We propose a potential explanation for the differential responses based on uneven staggering of wage contracts across quarters. Using a dynamic general equilibrium model, we show that a realistic amount of uneven staggering can generate differences in output responses quantitatively similar to those found in the data.

Every year housing markets in the United Kingdom and the United States experience systematic above-trend increases in prices and transactions during the spring and summer (“hot season”) and below-trend falls during the autumn and winter (“cold season”). House price seasonality poses a challenge to existing housing models. We propose a search-and-matching model with thick-market effects. In thick markets, the quality of matches increases, rising buyers' willingness to pay and sellers' desire to transact. A small, deterministic driver of seasonality can be amplified and revealed as deterministic seasonality in transactions and prices, quantitatively mimicking seasonal fluctuations in UK and US markets.

Economies at early stages of development are frequently shaken by large changes in growth rates, whereas advanced economies tend to experience relatively stable growth rates. To explain this pattern, we propose a model of technological diversification. Production makes use of input-varieties that are subject to imperfectly correlated shocks. Endogenous variety adoption by firms raises average productivity and provides diversification benefits against variety-specific shocks. Firm-level and aggregate volatility thus decline as a by-product of the development process. We quantitatively assess the model's predictions and find that it can generate patterns of volatility and development consistent with the data.

Although economists have long been aware of Jensen's inequality, many econometric applications have neglected an important implication of it: under heteroskedasticity, the parameters of log-linearized models estimated by OLS lead to biased estimates of the true elasticities. We explain why this problem arises and propose an appropriate estimator. Our criticism of conventional practices and the proposed solution extend to a broad range of applications where log-linearized equations are estimated. We develop the argument using one particular illustration, the gravity equation for trade. We find significant differences between estimates obtained with the proposed estimator and those obtained with the traditional method.

A widely held view is that openness to international trade leads to higher GDP volatility, as trade increases specialization and hence exposure to sector-specific shocks. We revisit the common wisdom and argue that when country-wide shocks are important, openness to international trade can lower GDP volatility by reducing exposure to domestic shocks and allowing countries to diversify the sources of demand and supply across countries. Using a quantitative model of trade, we assess the importance of the two mechanisms (sectoral specialization and cross-country diversification) and provide a new answer to the question of whether and how international trade affects economic volatility.

The U.K. economy experienced significant macroeconomic adjustments following the 2016 referendum on its withdrawal from the European Union. To understand these adjustments, this paper presents empirical facts using novel U.K. macroeconomic data and estimates a small open economy model with tradable and non-tradable sectors. We demonstrate that the referendum outcome can be interpreted as news about a future decline in productivity growth in the tradable sector. An immediate fall in the relative price of non-tradable goods induces a temporary “sweet spot” for tradable producers. Economic activity in the tradable sector expands in the short run, while the non-tradable sector contracts. Aggregate output, consumption, and investment growth decelerate.