For G-7 countries over the period 1961-1990, there appears to be a strong and stable negative correlation between annual changes in the current account and investment. Here we explore this correlation using a highly tractable empirical model that distinguishes between global and country-specific shocks. This distinction turns out to be quite important empirically, as global shocks account for roughly fifty percent of the overall variance of productivity. An apparent puzzle, however, is that the current account seems to respond by much less than investment to country-specific productivity shocks. Given the near random walk behavior of these shocks, this observation would appear to contradict a central cross-equation inequality restriction implied by the intertemporal approach. We show analytically, however, that the theoretically-predicted current account response can be extremely sensitive to small changes in the degree of mean reversion in country-specific productivity; in general, the current account response is more sensitive than is the investment response. Our results thus support the view that there is a significant convergent component to country-specific productivity shocks.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Ahmed, S. & Ickes, B. & Wang, P. & Yoo, S., 1989.
"International Business Cycles,"
Papers
7-89-4, Pennsylvania State - Department of Economics.
Other versions:
Ahmed, Shaghil & Ickes, Barry W. & Ping Wang & Byung Sam Yoo, 1993.
"International Business Cycles,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 83(3), pages 335-59, June.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Robert J. Barro & Xavier Sala-i-Martin, 1990.
"World Real Interest Rates,"
NBER Chapters,
in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1990, Volume 5, pages 15-74
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!]
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.