Understanding Real Exchange Rates

本研究计划分为三个部分。第一部分描述了按照国际比较项目的模式建立一个大型公共微价格档案的持续努力。关键的区别在于聚合的级别和数据的频率。国际比较方案以每5年一次的国际价格调查为基础，按年频率内插。商品和地点的汇总由国家统计机构进行。要实现编制国家平减指数的目标，必须在一个国家的各个地点进行汇总。本项目正在进行的收集微观价格数据的努力是出于挖掘经验事实的愿望，这些事实比通常可用的数据更清楚地区分相对价格决定的替代理论。例如，新开放经济宏观经济学是建立在一价定律在稳定状态下成立的假设之上的，并且所有商品在国内货币方面都具有相同的“粘性”（通常）。这与贸易商品和非贸易商品之间的传统二分法形成对比，贸易商品与一价定律（即运输成本）的稳态偏差较小，并且比非贸易商品更快地适应稳态。我们认为，由于使用综合指数数据代替微观数据，这场辩论有系统地存在偏见。汇总是有问题的，因为它不可避免地涉及对贸易商品和非贸易商品的偏差进行平均，从而模糊了两者之间的差异。前一届国家科学基金会奖的研究表明，商品的特征（贸易程度和非贸易投入的重要性）如何影响地理上的价格分散和相对价格持久性。然而，调查人员面临着数据的局限性：他们关于地理价格分散的结果仅限于欧盟，而关于持续性的结果涉及经合组织和发展中国家在有限时期（20世纪90年代）的子集。本建议的第二部分使用经济学人智库的数据，跨越国内和全球价格比较，在更广泛的经验背景下探索早期的结果。研究人员围绕零售价格决定的一个简单的部分均衡模型组织他们的分析，其中每个零售商品是交易和非交易投入的组合。通过对数据进行各种“切割”（即横断面、时间序列、地理和良好的特定变化），研究人员展示了模型匹配数据的许多特征的能力。该项目的第三部分将检查在新的经验设置先前的发现的稳健性；将实证工作推向新的方向；并将评估替代的最先进的模型的相对优点，在核算国际相对价格的横截面和时间序列行为，从单个商品的水平到总价格水平。更广泛的影响：来自本项目档案的数据将在特定地点的单个商品和服务级别（通常这些将是大城市，尽管一些数据延伸到零售机构级别）。每一个单独的档案都代表了用于研究目的的现有可用微数据的大量增加。研究人员还计划在同一网站上提供已发表的研究中使用的现有微价格数据库。

This research proposal is divided into three sections. The first section describes ongoing efforts to build a large public-use micro-price archive patterned after the International Comparison Project. Key differences are the level of aggregation and the frequency of data. The ICP is based on international price surveys at 5-year intervals, interpolated to annual frequencies. Aggregation across goods and locations is conducted by national statistical agencies. Aggregation across locations within a country is necessary to achieve the goal of producing a national deflator. This project's ongoing efforts to compile micro-price data are motivated by a desire to unearth empirical facts that more clearly distinguish alternative theories of relative price determination than is possible with data commonly available. For example, the New Open Economy Macroeconomics is built upon the assumption that the Law-of-One-Price holds in the steady-state and that all goods are equally 'sticky' (usually) in domestic currency terms. This contrasts with the conventional dichotomy between traded and non-traded goods, with traded goods having smaller steady-state deviations from the Law-of-One-Price (i.e., shipping costs) and adjusting more quickly to the steady-state than non-traded goods. In our view this debate has been systematically biased by the use of aggregative index number data in place of micro-data. Aggregation is problematic because it inevitably involves averaging of deviations across traded and non-traded goods, thereby obscuring the differences between the two. The research from the previous NSF award demonstrated how the characteristics of goods (extent of trade and importance of non-traded inputs) influenced geographic price dispersion and relative price persistence. However, the investigators faced data limitations: their results on geographic price dispersion were confined to the EU while those for persistence involved the OECD and a sub-set of developing countries over a limited time period (the 1990s). The second section of this proposal uses the Economist Intelligence Unit data, spanning both intranational and global price comparisons to explore the earlier results in a broader empirical setting. The investigators organize their analysis around a simple partial equilibrium model of retail price determination in which each retail good is a composite of a traded and non-traded input. Taking various "cuts" at the data (i.e. cross-sectional, time series, geographic, and good-specific variation), the investigators demonstrate the model's ability to match many features of the data. The third part of the project will examine the robustness of prior findings in novel empirical settings; take the empirical work in new directions; and will assess the relative merit of alternative state-of-the-art models in accounting for the cross-sectional and time series behavior of international relative prices from the level of individual goods up to aggregative price levels.Broader Impacts: The data from this project archives will be at the level of individual goods and services in particular locations (typically these will be large cities, though some of the data extends down to the level of retail establishments). Each individual archive represents a substantial increase in available micro-data in existence for research purposes. The investigators also plan to make existing micro-price databases that have been used in published research available on the same internet site.