Natural Exchange Rate and Its Implications for the Purchasing Power Parity Puzzle

The notion of purchasing power parity has been an important building block in the theory of nominal and real exchange rates and for many theoretic models in international economics, leading to the purchasing power parity puzzle. The central issue of the puzzle is how to reconcile volatile short-term movements of real exchange rates (defined as nominal exchange rates adjusted for differences in national price levels) with very slow convergence to the parity condition. The main emphasis of this article is to show that the slow adjustment of the natural exchange rate is responsible for the well-known slow convergence of the real exchange rate to the long-run parity condition. The novel element of this article is to identify the relative importance between the financial channel and output gap channel of the purchasing power parity puzzle. The empirical findings of this article suggest that the financial channel is a dominant factor to explain persistent deviations of the real exchange rate from its long-run level.