Sticky prices and sectoral real exchange rates

Patrick Kehoe and Virgiliu Midrigan

No 656, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Abstract: The classic explanation for the persistence and volatility of real exchange rates is that they are the result of nominal shocks in an economy with sticky goods prices. A key implication of this explanation is that if goods have differing degrees of price stickiness then relatively more sticky goods tend to have relatively more persistent and volatile good-level real exchange rates. Using panel data, we find only modest support for these key implications. The predictions of the theory for persistence have some modest support: in the data, the stickier is the price of a good the more persistent is its real exchange rate, but the theory predicts much more variation in persistence than is in the data. The predictions of the theory for volatility fare less well: in the data, the stickier is the price of a good the smaller is its conditional variance while in the theory the opposite holds. We show that allowing for pricing complementarities leads to a modest improvement in the theory's predictions for persistence but little improvement in the theory's predictions for conditional variances.

Keywords: Prices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-ifn and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

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