Category Archives: international

“Purchasing Power Parity and Real Exchange Rates”

That’s my new entry in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance.

The idea that prices and exchange rates adjust so as to equalize the common-currency price of identical bundles of goods—purchasing power parity (PPP)—is a topic of central importance in international finance. If PPP holds continuously, then nominal exchange rate changes do not influence trade flows. If PPP does not hold in the short run, but does in the long run, then monetary factors can affect the real exchange rate only temporarily. Substantial evidence has accumulated—with the advent of new statistical tests, alternative data sets, and longer spans of data—that purchasing power parity does not typically hold in the short run. One reason why PPP doesn’t hold in the short run might be due to sticky prices, in combination with other factors, such as trade barriers. The evidence is mixed for the longer run. Variations in the real exchange rate in the longer run can also be driven by shocks to demand, arising from changes in government spending, the terms of trade, as well as wealth and debt stocks. At time horizon of decades, trend movements in the real exchange rate—that is, systematically trending deviations in PPP—could be due to the presence of nontraded goods, combined with real factors such as differentials in productivity growth. The well-known positive association between the price level and income levels—also known as the “Penn Effect”—is consistent with this channel. Whether PPP holds then depends on the time period, the time horizon, and the currencies examined.

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A Business-Cycle Mystery: Manslaughter or Murder?

If recoveries don’t die of old-age, then they either have “accidents” or they’re murdered. I’m not sure what a business-cycle accident is, but we can check what might have killed the recovery, should we enter a recession in 2020, as suggested by some forward looking financial indicators. I’ll look at investment spending, a forward looking variable, highly sensitive to interest rates, and the outlook for economic activity and uncertainty.

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“Across-the-Board Tariffs on China with Retaliation and Federal Spending Create Over 1 Million Jobs in Five Years”

The Coalition for a Prosperous America publishes another study imbued with “secret sauce” structure…From the “working paper” (more akin to a press release):

Specifically, we introduce the effects of Chinese retaliation with tariffs on US exports to China; we add the effects of the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) programs to support farmers and food processors negatively affected by Chinese retaliation; and, we add the impact of the US government spending the revenue generated by the China  tariffs. We find that Chinese retaliation reduces the benefit to the US economy by 14 percent, but the net benefit remains large. The USDA programs provide relief to the agricultural industry and restore the net benefit to almost the same level as before the retaliation. Finally, we look at the impact of the government reinvesting the tariff revenue in the US economy by boosting government spending…

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Of Big Macs, PPP, the Penn Effect, and Currency Misalignment

From Anneken Tappe in CNNBusiness:

The Economist’s Big Mac Index — a lighthearted way to make the value of currencies more tangible — showed that nearly all currencies in the index are undervalued against the dollar.

The Big Mac Index, released Wednesday, is rooted in the theory of purchasing power parity: Exchange rates reflect the value of goods a currency can buy. If currency X can buy an item at a lower price than currency Y, then currency X may be comparatively undervalued and currency Y could be overvalued.

 
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