c11059 PDF

This PDF is a selection from an out-of-print volume from the National
Bureau of Economic Research
Volume Title: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2000, Volume 15

Volume Author/Editor: Ben S. Bernanke and Kenneth Rogoff, editors
Volume Publisher: MIT PRess
Volume ISBN: 0-262-02503-5
Volume URL: http://www.nber.org/books/bern01-1
Publication Date: January 2001
Chapter Title: The Six Major Puzzles in International Macroeconomics:

Is There a Common Cause?
Chapter Author: Maurice Obstfeld, Kenneth Rogoff
Chapter URL: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c11059
Chapter pages in book: (p. 339 - 412)
MauriceObstfeldandKennethRogoff
AND NBER;
UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA,BERKELEY
AND HARVARDUNIVERSITY
AND NBER
The
Six
Major
International
Is
There
Puzzles
in
Macroeconomics:
Common
Cause?
1. Introduction
International macroeconomics is a field replete with truly perplexing puzzles, and we generally have five to ten (or more) alternative answers to
each of them. These answers are typically very clever but far from thoroughly convincing, and so the puzzles remain. Why do people seem to
have such a strong preference for consumption of their home goods (the
home-bias-in-trade puzzle)? Why do observed OECD current-account
imbalances tend to be so small relative to saving and investment when
measured over any sustained period (the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle)?
Why do home investors overwhelmingly prefer to hold home equity assets (the home-bias portfolio puzzle)? Why isn't consumption more
highly correlated across OECD countries (the consumption correlations
puzzle)? How is it possible that the half-life of real exchange-rate innovations can be three to four years (the purchasing-power-parity puzzle)?
Why are exchange rates so volatile and so apparently disconnected from
fundamentals [the exchange-rate disconnect puzzle, of which the MeeseRogoff (1983) forecasting puzzle and the Baxter-Stockman (1989) neutrality-of-exchange-rate-regime puzzle are manifestations]?
What we attempt to do in this paper is to offer a unified basis for
We thankJayShambaughand JuanCarlosHallakfor excellentresearchassistance, and the
National Science Foundation for support. We gratefully acknowledge Charles Engel for
sharingdata and RobertFeenstrafor helpful advice. We have benefited from commentsby
Owen Kosling, Michael Kremer,RichardPortes, Assaf Razin, Helene Rey, Alan Taylor,
JeffreyWilliamson,and our discussants, Charles Engel and Olivier Jeanne, on an earlier
conferencedraftversion.
340 *OBSTFELD& ROGOFF

understanding all of these puzzles, in which the key friction is a (significant but plausible) level of international trade costs in goods markets.
These trade costs may include transport costs but also tariffs, nontariff
barriers, and possibly other broader factors that impede trade.
We do not pretend to be the first to make this connection. In a fundamental contribution to the literature on international trade and finance,
Samuelson (1954) argued that the existence of an international transfer
problem depends critically on whether there is a home bias in consumption, and he showed explicitly how a home bias could be derived from
transport costs.1 In subsequent research, however, Samuelson's straightforward approach has generally been abandoned in favor of a more
stylized paradigm based on breaking up a country's products into two
dichotomous categories, traded and nontraded goods.2 The analysis of
the present paper suggests that for many purposes, this dichotomous
grouping is far less helpful than the natural alternative of simply introducing trade costs.
Especially in our treatment of capital-market anomalies, the approach
in this paper differs from the one that is conventionally taken in the
literature. Typically, an author chooses from a menu of plausible capitalmarket imperfections the one best suited to explain a particular puzzle.
We do not deny the importance of a variety of imperfections peculiar to
international asset markets. Our goal here, however, is to show how far
one can go in elucidating major empirical riddles without appealing to
intrinsically international capital-market imperfections. Remarkably, we
find that once one allows for trade costs in goods markets, many of the
main empirical objections to the canonical models of international macroeconomics disappear. Our approach, which is based on a very simple
stylized model, seems to be particularly successful in resolving the realside quantity puzzles. To explain adequately the various pricing puzzles,
we would need to develop a much richer framework featuring imperfect
1. Obstfeld and Rogoff (1996, Chapter 4) embed trade costs in a version of the DornbuschFischer-Samuelson (1977) Ricardian model and show that Samuelson's transfer-problem
analysis can be extended to a modern dynamic setting. See Krugman (1991) on the
relevance of the transfer problem to contemporary debates in international macroeconomics.
2. A notable exception is Backus, Kehoe, and Kydland (1992), who find that their approximate method for incorporating small trade costs does not resolve the consumption
correlations puzzle in a calibrated one-good global real-business-cycle model. Another is
Dumas (1992), who looks at a dynamic, stochastic, one-good open economy model with
transport costs and explores a number of issues, including the forward exchange-rate
premium. His work is theoretical and qualitative, however, and he does not calibrate his
model's empirical implications for the various puzzles we look at here. Also, our main
points in this paper really require an extension to the multigood case. In a more recent
contribution, Ravn and Mazzenga (1999) examine further the business-cycle implications of transport costs in a variant of the Backus-Kehoe-Kydland model.
*341
TheSix MajorPuzzlesin International
Macroeconomics
competition plus sticky prices and/or wages, as in the extensive recent
literature on the "new open-economy macroeconomics." Although we
do not present such a model here, we do demonstrate why trade costs
must constitute an essential element, implicitly if not explicitly.
The first puzzle we address is the home-bias-in-trade puzzle (McCallum, 1995), which, as we have already noted, is closely related to the
classic transfer problem. Following Wei (1998) and Evans (1999), we
discuss how empirically plausible trade costs, combined with fairly standard estimates of elasticities of substitution across imports and exports,
can explain much of the puzzle.
Having established the trade friction at the core of our analysis, we next
turn to one of the most robust and intractable puzzles in international
finance, the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle. We show that trade costs can
create a wedge between the effective real interest rates faced by borrowers
and lenders. In our model, the effect is highly nonlinear, manifesting itself
strongly only when current-account imbalances become very large. We
argue that it is precisely such incipient real-interest-rate effects that keep
observed current-account imbalances within a modest range. Though we
rely primarily on the theoretical force of the argument, we do demonstrate
empirically that current-account-deficit countries tend to have higher real
interest rates, as our model predicts.
Next, we show that the same approach can simply and elegantly explain the widely discussed home bias in equity holdings (or, more generally, in overall asset positions). The following section covers the consumption correlations puzzle, which is closely related to the preceding
three, so it is not surprising our same approach again applies. We also
briefly address other related puzzles.
We largely ignore nominal rigidities in our discussion of the first four
puzzles, because our main argument does not depend upon having
them. But as we turn to our last two puzzles-the
purchasing-powerparity puzzle and the exchange-rate disconnect puzzle-we
obviously
must think about adding other ingredients, in the form of imperfect
competition and some degree of price or wage rigidity. We nevertheless
argue that trade costs in output markets must be an essential ingredient in resolving these puzzles as well. The final section concludes and
also evaluates our results in the light of long-term trends in world
transport costs.
2. ThePuzzleof HomeBiasin Trade(Puzzle1)

The starting point for all the puzzles we examine is the growing evidence
that international goods markets appear to be far more segmented than is

commonly supposed. Perhaps the most dramatic suggestion of segmentation stems from the work of McCallum (1995). Using a simple Tinbergen
(1962) gravity model of trade that controls for distance, trading-partner
sizes, and a small number of other factors, McCallum found that trade
among individual Canadian provinces was twenty times greater than
trade between individual Canadian provinces and individual U.S. states,
a surprisingly high differential. It is true that the subsequent literature has
both tempered McCallum's estimates and challenged their interpretation.
McCallum's calculations were based on the year 1988, still at the dawn of
the U.S.-Canada free-trade agreement, and before trade patterns had
time to adjust fully. Using data for 1993-1996, Helliwell (1998) found that
the unexplained home bias had fallen to a factor of 12, which remains a
surprisingly large number. Though intracountry trade data are available
only for Canada and the United States, Wei (1998) and Evans (1999) use
indirect methods to test home bias for other OECD country pairs. Wei
suggests that the average bias may be as low as 2.5, while Evans finds
values intermediate between Wei's and Helliwell's.3 Van Wincoop (2000)
argues that even though McCallum controls for state and province size in
his gravity equation, his trade-diversion measure gives an exaggerated
impression of home bias in global trade because it calculates the bias from
the perspective of the small country, Canada, rather than from the perspective of the large country, the United States.4 Overall, a balanced interpretation of the literature is that countries do exhibit a considerable degree
of home bias in trade, but the bias is not as extreme as McCallum's original
estimates suggested.
But if there is still a significant degree of home bias in international
trade, how can we explain it? Clearly, international trade does involve
added border costs such as tariffs, nontariff barriers, and exchange-rate
risk (and it is also possible that domestic transportation costs are lower
due to greater coordination problems in constructing international transportation networks). Do these border costs need to be implausibly large
to generate observed home bias, even in the more modest range of Wei's
3. Wei (1998) tries to estimate home bias indirectly by assuming that the amount a country
imports from itself is the difference between total production and total exports. However, Wei's 2.5 home bias estimate could be downward biased due to his exclusion of the
service sector. Evans (1999) uses data on selected industries for a number of OECD
countries.
4. Van Wincoop (2000) shows that McCallum's measure of trade bias must be carefully
interpreted to ascertain the negative border effect on U.S.-Canada trade. Because Canada's economy is so small relative to that of the United States, a moderate percentage
diversion of U.S.-Canada trade into intra-Canada trade amounts to a spectacular percentage increase in intra-Canada trade. Using U.S. interstate trade data, van Wincoop
estimates that the U.S.-Canada border reduces trade between the two countries by at
most 30%.
*343
Macroeconomics
and Evans' estimates? Not necessarily, since what really matters is the
interaction between border costs and the elasticity of substitution between home and foreign goods. As this is a recurring theme in our
discussion of the various quantity puzzles, it is helpful to take up a
simple illustrative example.
2.1 A MODELOF THEINTERACTION
BETWEENTRADECOSTS
AND THEPRICEELASTICITY
OF DEMAND
Here, we show how costs of international trade can dramatically skew
domestic consumption in favor of home-produced goods.
Consider an extremely simple two-country endowment economy, in
which the utility function of the representative home consumer is given
by
C= (C(H 10+cr
\ 0/(-1)
1)1)
(1)
where CHis home consumption of the home-produced good and CF is

home consumption of the foreign-produced good. Foreign agents are
assumed to have identical utility functions in C1 and CF. Home agents
are endowed with YHper capita of the home good, and foreign agents
are endowed with YF. We assume iceberg shipping costs T, so that for
every unit of home (foreign) good shipped abroad, only a fraction 1 - T
arrives at the foreign (home) shore. Let PH(PF) be the home price of the
home (foreign) good, and PH(PFj)the corresponding foreign prices, with
all prices measured in terms of a common world monetary unit. (Since
we are in a flexible-price world here, it is not important whether the two
countries share a common currency.) Then, if markets are competitive,
arbitrage implies that
PF = P/(l
- r),
(2)
PH= (1 - T)P*.
(3)
Thus, if p - PF/PH, and p*
p* = p(l - T)2.
PF/PH,
(4)
(We will maintain the assumption of competitive markets through the

first four sections, though our main points would still apply in an imperfectly competitive setting, as in our discussion of puzzles 5 and 6.)
From the first-order conditions for utility maximization by home and
foreign agents, we have

CH
C(
-P
(5)
(p.
CrF
F
C?
Combining (4) and (5) implies

CH
29C!
CH(1 CF
7) 2C(6)
CF
For illustrative purposes, consider the easy symmetric case in which

YH = YF. Under that assumption,
and equation (6) reduces

CH/CF = CF*/CH
to
CH
CF
H= -=(1
- 7)- = p .
CF CH
This equation shows that the ratio of home (foreign) expenditure on

imports relative to home (foreign) goods is
C-
pCF
- Tp)1- (1 CH
Thus, for example, if there were no trade costs (7 = 0), then pCF/CH = 1.
If r = 0.25 (a large number just for goods actually traded but conservative when applied to all of GNP) and 0 = 6, then CH/pCF = 4.2. This ratio
is consistent with those we observe for many OECD countries, and the
degree of home bias can easily be made larger by raising 7, raising 0, or
assuming that the home country is a small one trading with many likesized foreign partners.
BETWEENTRADECOSTS
2.2 THENONLINEARRELATIONSHIP
AND HOMEBIASIN TRADE
The higher trade costs (the closer 7 is to 1), the greater the impact of a 1%
reduction in r on home bias:
d log(CH/pCF)
d log 7
1- T
For our baseline case of r = 0.25 and 0 = 6, the elasticity of home bias
with respect to trade costs is 7(0 - 1)/(1 - r) = 1.67.
*345
Macroeconomics
Obviously, this example is wildly oversimplified. It implicitly assumes
a common substitution elasticity across any individual pair of home and
foreign goods, and similarly lumps all goods together as having common
trade costs. It ignores the potential importance of substitution between
domestic and foreign inputs in production. Nevertheless, it neatly illustrates how a high elasticity of substitution can explain a large observed
home trade bias even with low trade costs. What then are plausible
values for the parameters r and 0?
OF 0
2.3 EMPIRICAL
ESTIMATES
Though there is a range of estimates for 0, recent trade studies typically
find values for the elasticity of import demand with respect to price
(relative to the overall domestic consumption basket) in the neighborhood of 5 to 6. Examples include Trefler and Lai (1999), who present
panel estimates over 1972-1992 for a panel of 28 industries in 36 countries; their preferred estimate is 5.3. That average number reflects estimated disaggregated substitution elasticities as high as 21.4 (for industrial chemicals) and 18.9 (for electrical machinery and electronics) but as
low as 1.2 (for printing and publishing). Harrigan (1993) looks at threedigit 1983 SITC data for 13 OECD countries representing 90% of OECD
output and finds elasticities in the range of 5 to 12.
Recognizing that much of trade involves imperfectly competitive industries, one can attempt to infer the value of 0 by looking at markups of
price over marginal cost. Using that approach, Cheung, Chinn, and Fujii
(1999) look at two-digit industry level data for a range of OECD countries, and impute elasticities typically in the range of 3.5 to 4. Hummels
(1999a) tries to disentangle the effects of trade elasticities from those of
substitution elasticities within a cross-section framework. Using linear
least squares, he comes up with an average markup of 22%, translating
into a 0 of 5.6, although other of his estimates of 0 are higher. Finally, in
their classic article on the demand for automobiles-including
both domestic and foreign makes-Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1995) find
price elasticities of demand between 3.1 and 6.4.5
Of course, these studies refer to goods actually traded. As Hummels
emphasizes, one would expect that elasticities of substitution would be
higher on average for goods that are not traded. In this case, an estimate
5. Studies of monopoly markups in domestic sales, while not necessarily directly applicable here, also yield similar estimates for 0. For example, Rotemberg and Woodford (1992)
find a markup for the United States of around 20%, corresponding to 0 = 6. In subsequent discussion, Rotemberg and Woodford (1995) argue that there is great uncertainty
about actual markups in U.S. industry, but favor estimates in the range of 20% to 40%,
that is, 0 between about 3.5 and 6.

of 0 = 20, as Wei proposes, does not seem so wild-eyed. Brown and
Stern (1989) use 6 = 15 for their policy experiments.
2.4 EMPIRICAL
ESTIMATES
OF TRADECOSTST
There is far less consensus about the size of trade costs, which include
(among other things), tariffs, nontariff barriers, and transport costs. For
1993, average tariffs, on a domestic-production-weighted basis, were
4.9% for the United States, 7.7% for the European Union, 3.5% for Japan, and 8.9% for Canada.6 As for nontariff barriers, official statistics
only give information on their existence, not their effectiveness, which
must be estimated using an economic model. Anderson and Neary
(1998) use a simple computable general equilibrium model to estimate
uniform tariff equivalents for nontariff barriers for a broad range of
countries, and typically find estimates on the same order of magnitude
as for tariffs, larger of course for some countries (such as Japan) than for
others (such as the United States). This result is also consistent with the
trade-equation estimates of Lee and Swagel (1997).7
Differential international transportation costs are also an important
potential element of 7.8 If one looks across all commodities on a valueweighted basis, freight and insurance charges for U.S. imports averaged
3.6% in 1995, and 3.3% in 1996 and 1997.9 But these numbers considerably understate average costs in international shipping. First, As Hummels (1999a) shows, average costs are much higher for many other countries (the United States has a vast coastline, and sea shipping tends to be
much cheaper than shipping by land). Second, these numbers do not
include other considerable costs of international shipping, including preparing the paperwork (bills of lading) needed to clear international customs, and the costs of delays either in transit or at port of entry.
Just as empirical measures of the elasticity of substitution between
home and foreign goods may be biased downwards, it is also likely that
simple estimates of average transport costs grossly understate average r
across all goods in the economy (due to substitution effects). Table 1 is
drawn from Hummels (1999a), who based his estimates on highly disag6. See OECD (1996, Table 1.1, row 9).
7. Harrigan (1993), however, finds nontariff barriers insignificant compared to tariffs and
transportation costs.
8. Recall that Helliwell's and McCallum's estimates use distance in an attempt to control
for transport costs. Geographical distance is an imperfect measure of these, however.
9. The authors are grateful to Robert Feenstra for compiling these numbers based on U.S.
Imports of Merchandise, U.S. Census Bureau. The estimates give shipping and freight
charges as a percentage of total value of imports excluding these charges. Importantly,
these numbers do not include any inland shipping at point of departure or port of
arrival.
Macroeconomics
?347
OF FREIGHTRATES(UNITED
Table 1 COMMODITYDISTRIBUTION
STATES,1994)a
rate
Averagefreight
Commodity
All goods
Food and live animals
Beveragesand tobacco
Crude materials
Mineralfuels, lubricants
Animal and veg. oils, fats
Chemicalsand related products
Manuf. goods (by material)
Machineryand transp. equip.
Misc. manufactures
All other goods, NES
Trade-weighted
3.8
8.2
6.9
8.2
6.6
7.1
4.5
5.3
2.0
4.7
1.0
unweighted
14.1
14.4
15.1
15.7
10.6
9.0
10.3
5.7
8.3
2.5
aSource:Hummels (1999a),compiled from U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Importsof Merchandise.

Freight
costs include shipping and insuranceas a percentageof total FASvalue. Calculationsare based on 10digit HarmonizedSystem level data (over 15,000categoriesof goods). Unweighted shipping costs are
based on all individualgoods imported.
gregated 10-digit data. We see from the table that shipping costs for
many categories of goods are quite a bit larger than the average (tradeweighted) shipping costs-and this table excludes goods that are not
traded at all.
What other factors might be included in r?In a provocative paper, Rose
(2000) uses a gravity model to argue that countries with currency unions
trade two to three times as much with each other as countries with
separate currencies. Certainly, currency conversion costs and exchangerate uncertainty can add to trade costs. While exchange-rate variability
can have direct negative effects on capital flows, any direct negative effect
on trade flows will result in an additional, indirect source of capitalmarket imperfection according to our analysis. A similar point can be
made for various informational costs of international trade; see Rauch
(1999) and Portes and Rey (1999) for discussion and some empirical evidence.10 Differences in legal and payments systems may also add to r.
Last, but not least, it is important to emphasize that our analysis has
assumed no home bias in preferences. Suppose we replace the representative home agent's utility function (1) with
10. Anderson and Marcouiller (1999) argue that corruption and imperfect contract enforcement are major factors in disrupting trade, especially in developing countries. Since
our main focus is on industrialized countries, we will not consider these categories of
trade cost further here.

U = (C(H )/ + wC 1)/)?/0-1)
(7)
and the representativeforeign agent's utility function with

U* = (wC *(-1)/S + CF-'/1)/0)-1)
One can easily show that the effects of home bias in preferences (w < 1)
can be isomorphic to the effects of trade costs r. Helpman (1999)argues
that once one controls for income, there is no clear evidence of home
bias in preferences. Indeed, it is more illuminating to derive tradebiases
from other frictions. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that a
home bias in demand for goods can work similarlyto trade costs, at least
for the trade and portfolio-biaspuzzles.
2.5 OTHERREAL-TRADE
PU7ZI7.S
Though international-financepuzzles are our main focus, we note that

trade costs can explain a number of real-tradepuzzles as well. For example, Trefler's(1995) favored explanation of the "missing trade" puzzle
combines Hicks-neutralproductivity differences across countries with a
home bias in consumption (which, per our discussion above, may be
induced by transportcosts).ll Deardorff(1998)points out that with transport costs, the standard conditions for factor-price equalization in a
Heckscher-Ohlin world break down, also implying greater specialization. Since factor-priceequalization fails miserably empirically,this implies another important puzzle that can be at least partially resolved by
transport costs. Anderson (1979), Deardorff (1998), and others have
shown that transport costs can help explain the surprising empirical
robustness of the gravityequation of trade flows. Not only do trade costs
help to resolve a number of puzzles in the data, they also seem to be
important in determining economic performance. Radelet and Sachs
(1998)argue that countries that have high shipping costs due to adverse
geography (for example, high mountains or limited port access) grow
much more slowly than countries with natural transport advantages.
Finally,we note that evidence on internationalprice differentialsseems
quite consistent with the high degree of marketsegmentation evinced on
the quantities side; we shall refer to this work later in discussing puzzles
5 and 6.
Armed with a simple understanding of how plausible trade costs together with high elasticities of substitution in consumption can explain
11. "Missing trade" is how Trefler describes the puzzle that the imputed factor content of
trade does not seem to reflect comparative advantage.
*349
Macroeconomics
substantial home biases in trade, we are ready to explore the linkages to
other macro puzzles.
3. TheFeldstein-Horioka
Puzzle(Puzzle2)
There has been no shortage of explanations for the famous savinginvestment puzzle of Feldstein and Horioka (1980), with numerous articles on the topic having been published in most of the leading journals.
The problem is that none of the explanations advanced to date (including our own attempts) has been terribly convincing. Most explanations
tend to be clever but empirically inadequate and, more troublesome still,
tend to fix one puzzle at the expense of creating others. The fact that the
Feldstein-Horioka regularity does not seem to characterize intranational
regional data suggests that factors intrinsic to trade between different
nations are at work.12
3.1 STILLA PUZZLE
What Feldstein and Horioka actually demonstrated, of course, is that
across OECD countries, long-period averages of national saving rates
are highly correlated with similar averages of domestic investment rates.
Indeed, in the original data sample examined by Feldstein and Horioka,
covering 1960 through the mid-1970s, cross-section regressions of investment on saving yielded slope coefficients near unity. True, this
Feldstein-Horioka coefficient-which
the original work interpreted as
the
effect
of
the
rate
on the investment rate, or a
measuring
saving
retention"
fallen
measure-has
over time. As Table 2 illus"savings
trates, however, it still remains large and significant. The table gives
simple cross-country regressions of investment (relative to GDP) against
national saving (relative to GDP), taking eight-year averages for the
most recent period, 1990-1997. For the OECD countries, the coefficient
(0.60) is a good deal smaller than the 0.89 found in Feldstein and
Horioka's original work, but it is still larger than one might expect in a
world of fully integrated capital markets where global savings should
flow to the regions with the highest rates of return. The coefficient falls
further once one includes countries outside the OECD (particularly poor
countries), although the extended results must be viewed with extreme
caution given the poor quality of national income and product data for
most non-OECD countries. (The data underlying the regressions in Table 2 are reported in Table 7 in the appendix, which also describes how
the countries in the sample were chosen.)
12. See Obstfeld (1995),Obstfeldand Rogoff (1996),and Coakley,Kulasi,and Smith (1998)
for recent surveys.
350 * OBSTFELD & ROGOFF

Table 2 FELDSTEIN-HORIOKA REGRESSIONS, I/Y = a + 13NS/Y + E,
1990-1997a
No. of obs.
13
R2
All countriesb
56
0.15
(0.02)
0.41
(0.08)
0.33
Countries with GNP/cap. > 1000
48
0.13
(0.02)
0.48
(0.09)
0.39
Countries with GNP/cap. > 2000
41
0.07
(0.02)
0.70
(0.09)
0.62
OECD countriesc
24
0.08
(0.02)
0.60
(0.09)
0.68
aOLS regressions. Standard errors in parentheses.

bIsrael is excluded from all regressions in this table. If Israel is added to the samples of size (56, 48, 41),
the estimates of / are (0.39, 0.45, 0.63).
If one adds Korea to the OECD sample, the estimate for 3 rises to 0.76. Korea is included in the larger
samples.
The Feldstein-Horioka puzzle is durable because the core regression

simply summarizes in a compact way the fact that OECD current accounts tend to be surprisingly small relative to total saving and investment, especially when one averages over any sustained period. For
developing countries, notably the many that have repeatedly had trouble servicing debts, it is perhaps not so surprising that creditors prevent
them from running up large sustained deficits. But it is hard to appeal to
sovereign-default risk for OECD countries, especially when one considers that gross international flows of financial assets are much bigger than
net international flows. Indeed, for OECD countries, asset price comparisons suggest a high degree of integration; arbitrage in similar nominally
risk-free assets appears to be nearly perfect. We leave it to the reader to
look at other sources (for example, Obstfeld and Rogoff, 1996, Chapter 3)
for assessments of previous attempts to explain the Feldstein-Horioka
conundrum.
A fair summary of the literature is that there are at least five or six
leading explanations (and ten or so close seconds). All are unconvincing
empirically-some because they are based on very special assumptions
about the nature of the exogenous shocks (e.g., Obstfeld, 1986, or Mendoza, 1991), others because they raise collateral empirical contradictions.
For example, in the asymmetric information model of Gordon and
Bovenberg (1996), a "lemons" problem is invoked to explain why foreigners finance so little domestic investment, yet departures from covered
*351
Macroeconomics
interest parity must also be assumed if there is to be any foreign equity
inflow at all. Explanations that try to maintain the assumption of perfect
capital mobility often have the strong implication that one should also
observe high saving-investment correlations across states or regions
within a given country. But the partial evidence available on saving and
investment by subnational regions simply does not produce the Feldstein-Horioka regularity; see, for example, Helliwell (1998, Chapter 4).
We are going to propose here an entirely new explanation, based on
transaction costs for international trade in goods. An especially attractive feature of our approach is that it seems to help resolve other puzzles
rather than exacerbating them.
It is important to emphasize that whereas our model includes trade
costs for goods, it is consistent with free and costless trade in securities.
Thus, it is perfectly consistent with the observation that gross international flows of securities are substantial even though net flows are small.
Our account is also notable both for endogenizing the price and interest
effects of trade impediments, and for showing how moderate transport
costs could generate empirically significant international differences in
real interest rates despite full asset-market integration.
3.2 TRANSPORTCOSTSCAN INDUCEA NONLINEAR
RELATIONSHIP
BETWEENTHECURRENTACCOUNTAND THE
REALINTERESTRATE
The basic intuition of why transport costs can temper current-account
imbalances can be illustrated in a standard two-period, two-good, smallcountry endowment model. It would not be difficult to endogenize the
world real interest rate, or to incorporate uncertainty (as in the next
section), but neither generalization is essential here. We will later discuss
investment to confirm that the basic argument we make still goes
through.
The model below is entirely standard except that we will again allow
for Samuelsonian "iceberg" costs in trade, so that Tpercent of any good
is lost in transit. The utility function of a representative home resident is
u(C) + 8u(C2),
where total real consumption C depends on consumption of the home
and foreign goods, CHand CF,with constant elasticity of substitution 0 as
in equation (1). The small country is endowed only with good H, with
YH,1 in period 1, and YH,2in period 2. Good F must always be imported.
(Endowing the country with both goods would not overturn our argument.) The home country is small in the sense that its actions have no

effect on the world prices PHand PF, which are constant across the two
periods in terms of a world unit of account (money). Nor can it affect the
foreign real interest rate r* (which equals the foreign nominal interest
rate assuming there is zero foreign inflation). Because of iceberg transit
costs T in shipping either good, however, home consumption patterns
can affect home relative prices and the home real interest rate.
Though we shall give a formal analysis below, the basic argument is
simple. Suppose, for example, that the country's endowment pattern and
rate of time preference 8 are such that in the first period, net exports of
good H are negative (in which case intertemporal solvency dictates they
must be positive in period 2). Then, as we shall shortly confirm, the
relative price of good H will be higher in period 1 than in period 2. There
will be expected deflation, and the home real interest rate will be above r*.
The situation is reversed when the country is initially running a sufficiently large current-account surplus, so that its real consumption-based
lending rate must lie below r*. As we demonstrate formally below, this
effect can be quite dramatic, assuming realistic values for trade costs and
the elasticity of substitution 0 (values similar to those needed to resolve
the home-bias-in-trade puzzle).13
3.3 BUDGETCONSTRAINTSAND TRANSPORTCOSTS
A formal analysis requires one to think carefully about the budget constraints facing the representative agent. In general, the first-period budget constraint can be written as
PH1H,1 H
+ D
PH,1CH,l + PF,1CF,1l
PlCl
where PH(PF)is the home-soil price of good H (F) in terms of the world
currency unit, and D is borrowing from abroad in world currency units.
The overall home price level, in terms of world currency units, is
P = (Pj-0 + p-)/l-
(8)
Therefore, given a total real consumption level C in any period, the

consumptions of the two individual home and foreign goods are
CH=
PH -
C,
CCF=
P(9F
C.
(9)
13. Dumas (1992)likewise shows how internationalreal interest-ratedifferentialscan arise

in a model with transportcosts, though, as we have alreadynoted, his one-good model
is very different and he does not explore the implicationsfor the Feldstein-Horioka
puzzle.
Macroeconomics
*353
Similarly, the second-period budget constraint, measured in world
currency units, is
PH,2H,2 - (1 +
r*)D = PH,2CH,2+ PF,2CF,2= P2C2.
Combining the period budget constraints gives the consolidated intertemporal budget constraint as
P2C2
PC11 +
1 + r*
+
=PH,lYH,1
PH,2YH,2
1 + r*
or, in terms of the domestic real interest rate 1 + r = (1 + r*)PI/P2, as

C, +
C2
1 + r
PHlyHl+
Pi
1
+ r
PH,2H,2
)PYH
P2
(10)
3.4 INFLATION
Since good F is always imported, its home price, PF =PF/(1 - r), must be
higher than the foreign price in both periods, per equation (2). By the
same logic, when good H is exported- as it must be in at least one of
the two periods-its home price PH = PH(1 - T)must be lower than the
foreign price, per equation (3). However, if total domestic spending is
high enough relative to income in any given period, it is possible that
good H is imported rather than exported (CH > YH), in which case its
home price PH = PH/(1 - T)must be higher than the foreign price. As we
shall see, there are also important intermediate cases where CH= YHin
one period, in which case PHwill turn out to lie between P*(1 - r) and
P*/(1 - T), despite the fact that no goods roundtrip.
3.5 A GRAPHICALANALYSISOF THELINKBETWEENREAL
INTERESTRATESAND CURRENTACCOUNTS
The link between the effective real interest rate faced by the home country and its first-period borrowing decision is illustrated in Figure 1,
which plots total real consumption in period 1, C1, against the domestic
real interest rate, 1 + r. (Note that the period 1 current account deficit is
simply Y1 - C1). The resulting graph is a step function that can be
divided up into five segments; it shows the schedule of effective real
interest rates faced by the country as a function of its borrowing-lending
decision.
In the first segment C1 is so low, and the period 1 current-account
surplus so high, that in period 2 the country will consume an amount

Figure 1 DOMESTIC SPENDING AND THE DOMESTIC REAL INTEREST
RATE IN A TWO-GOOD MODEL WITH TRADE COSTS
Domesticrealinterestrate,1 + r
Worldreal
interest
--
--------
rate,1 + r
totalreal
First-period
spending,Cl
CH,2> YH,2 Since in period 2 the home good must be imported, while in
period 1 it is exported, we have

1 +
(1 + r*) (P,-19
H + P-F
(Pk2 ? P:/9)
(1 + r*) {[PH(1
{[P/(1
9)11(1-9)
7)11-0 + Pl-}1/(1-
T)]1p/-F +
F=
< 1 + r*
1/-(0)
in segment I. If the country contemplates being a big lender, it will face

an effective real interest rate significantly below the world real interest
rate.
Segment II starts when period 1 consumption first reaches the level Cln
such that CH,2 = YH,2- In this region, PH,2 is determined by equation (8) and
the first relation in equation (9), with CH,2 = YH,2 (so there is no round-
*355
Macroeconomics
tripping). Period 2 consumption of the home good remains constant at
YH,2as long as PH2remains strictly between P((1 - T)and P*/(1 - T),but
equation (9) implies that PH,2falls as C1rises and C2falls, until PH,2reaches
P*(1 - T).Accordingly, the real interest rate rises over segment II.14At the
point C1 = Cm,Segment III begins as the home country becomes a period
2 exporter of its endowment good. On this stretch, 1 + r = 1 + r*.
Because here, CH < YHin both periods, the overall price level is constant
over time. In region III, the country is running a sufficiently small
current-account surplus or deficit that there is never any reversal of the
pattern of trade in either good. It is precisely in this region that trade
costs have no effect on the real interest rate.
At C1 = Cv, however, CH, reaches YH,, and the real interest rate begins
to rise once more. In segment IV, CH, remains stuck at YH,1 as C1 rises,
pushing PH,1up with it until PH, reaches PH/(1 - 7). As P,H rises along
segment IV, with PH2constant at PH(1 - T), the real interest rate rises. At
Cv, however, where PH, first reaches PH/(1 - T), the country becomes a
period 1 importer of its own endowment good, and the real interest rate
stabilizes (along segment V) at the level
l+r
+ =r (1 + r*) {[PH/(1 - T)]1-o + P1-J}1/(1-)

{[P4(1 -
T)]1'- +
+ r*
>1 +
Pl-U1/(1-9)
The range of possible real interest rates produced by this simple example can encompass a wide distribution. For example, with r* = 0.05, r =
0.1, 0 = 6, and PH = PF = 1, we find that the highest possible real interest
rate is 20% (15% above the world level) while the lowest is -8% (13%
below the world level). The interplay between the commodity transport
costs T and the substitution elasticity 0 is similar to what we saw in the
preceding section. As 0 rises, the maximum and minimum real domestic
interest rates move apart-with higher substitutability, the price-level
impacts of changes in P, are more pronounced. In the limiting case as 0
-oo the two goods are asymptotically perfect substitutes, in which case
the country's effective real borrowing rate will be 30%, and its lending
rate, -15%!
Of course, the range of real domestic interest rates encompassed by
Figure 1 is far greater than what we usually observe in practice, especially for OECD countries. But this simply reflects the fact that incipient
14. The increasing portions of the schedule have the shapes we show for 0-values that are
plausibly high.

real interest differentials put a sharp check on a country's incentives to
run large current-account deficits or surpluses.15
3.6 EXTENSIONSAND ALTERNATIVE
FORMULATIONS
The preceding account of the effect of domestic spending on real interest
rates is overly stylized, but a number of obvious extensions can add to
realism without diluting the main message.
3.6.1 A Continuum of Goods and TransportCosts Assume, for example,
that countries are endowed with multiple goods in various proportions
and that these goods display a distribution of transport costs. Then, as
domestic spending rises, progressively more types of goods are imported from abroad, leading to a steadily rising real domestic interest
rate. In this more realistic setup, the relationship between expenditure
and the home real interest rate will still resemble a version of Figure 1,
but with very many small steps-to the naked eye, a smoothly upwardsloping curve. With a rich enough range of goods, transport costs, and
elasticities of substitution, even small current-account deficits may produce trade reversals in a small number of goods, thereby resulting in an
interest-rate effect. We conjecture, though it remains to be proved, that
one would obtain a similar nonlinearity to that depicted in Figure 1, with
small current-account imbalances having relatively little effect on interest differentials.
3.6.2 Long-TermBorrowingand Lending An obvious question is how the
results here might be tempered in a model with many periods so that
there are opportunities for long-term borrowing and lending. For example, if a country ran a big current-account deficit in the initial periods, it
could repay slowly over many periods. Though a more careful analysis
is required than we can provide here, it seems unlikely that this consideration would overturn our basic point; there would still be a big price
is
swing between the big deficit periods and surplus periods-which
also
We
note
to
avoid
such
would
seek
a
swings.
precisely why country
that in a richer model with a continuum of goods, the current account
would not necessarily have to swing between deficit and surplus to
induce real-interest-rate effects. In general, the range and type of goods
15. The suggestion that idiosyncratic real-interest-rate developments might help explain
the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle can be found in earlier work, for example, Frankel
(1986). However, to the extent that real-interest-rate effects have been touched upon in
the literature, no one has taken the idea very seriously, since earlier models could not
give any reason why the real interest rate might be so important quantitatively. Nor
could they really explain the durability of the Feldstein-Horioka relationship across
different time periods and regimes.
*357
Macroeconomics
being imported and/or exported will vary more or less continuously in
the level of trade-balance deficit (or surplus). Thus, the real-interest-rate
effect will arise along any path where there are big trade-balance swings,
either over any short period, or cumulatively over any long period. This
would be true even in a setting with growth in which countries could, in
principle, run perpetual deficits and surpluses.
3.6.3 Investment How is the preceding analysis affected by introducing
investment? In the case where the country desires to be a large net
borrower (segments IV and V), the real-interest-rate effect will be tempered to the extent the country can cut back on investment instead of
borrowing from abroad. But that very mechanism dictates that reductions in national saving will be accompanied by reductions in domestic
investment. In segments I and II, the country could channel some of its
higher savings into higher investment, again tempering the fall in the
effective real interest rate but creating the positive Feldstein-Horioka
correlation between increases in saving and increases in investment.16
3.6.4 Deriving Similar Results in a More ConventionalSetup with Tradedand
NontradedGoods The reader may well ask whether we needed such an
extravagant formulation to make the basic point that the consumptionbased real interest rate can be linked to the current account. Couldn't we
have made the same point in the context of a standard Salter-Swan
model having two classes of goods, one with infinite trade costs and the
other with zero trade costs (as discussed, for example, in Chapter 4 of
Obstfeld and Rogoff, 1996)? Indeed, for a pure endowment case, the
standard traded-nontraded model does produce a graph very much like
Figure 1. Holding endowments of both goods flat, if the country chooses
to run a large deficit in period 1, the price of nontraded goods will be
high in that period, and low in the following period. This implies a
consumption-based real interest rate above the world interest rate, just
as in segments IV and V of Figure 1, and the effect can similarly be nonlinear. We prefer our formulation largely because it is much easier to
think concretely about trade costs than about the arbitrary dividing line
between traded and nontraded goods. Perhaps the ideal model would
be a richer one incorporating a range of transport costs in which the
degree of tradability is endogenous and some goods are consistently
produced exclusively for the home market.
16. Though their focus is on the short-run time-series properties of the data rather than on
the Feldstein-Horioka regularity, Backus, Kehoe, and Kydland (1992) do note that a
small trade cost can sharply reduce the variability of net exports in their simulations.

3.6.5 Monopoly Pricing and Sticky Prices Our analysis assumes that
prices are flexible and set in competitive markets. Introducing realistic
features such as price rigidity and monopoly pricing, as in our discussion of puzzles 5 and 6, would enrich the model without overturning the
main points. Also, the most troubling manifestations of the FeldsteinHorioka puzzle are at medium-term horizons of five to fifteen years,
when price flexibility is much greater and firms' ability to preserve monopoly power is less.
3.7 EMPIRICS
The model does contain one simple prediction that can easily be
checked. Countries running current-account surpluses should have
lower real interest rates than countries running deficits.
This connection is illustrated in the panel regression results reported
in Table 3. Specification 1 regresses the domestic real interest rate, defined as the average three-month nominal interest rate in a given year
less lagged annual inflation, on the ratio of the current-account surplus
to GDP. Specification 2 forms real interest rates by using December average nominal interest rates in year t less year t inflation, in an attempt to
Table3 REALINTERESTRATESAND THECURRENTACCOUNT,

1975-1998
Coefficient
on CA/GDP Significance
R2
1
Specification
OLS
Country fixed effects
Country fixed effects, time dummies
-36.9
-46.3
-32.3
0.00
0.00
0.00
0.65
0.65
0.55
0.05
0.08
0.50
-17.9
-19.4
-18.9
0.00
0.00
0.01
0.58
0.58
0.54
0.02
0.05
0.32
2
Specification
OLS
Country fixed effects
Country fixed effects, time dummies
The dependentvariableis the annualizedthree-monthnominalinterestrateless lagged annualinflation

CPI rate (specification1) or less the contemporaneousinflationrate (specification2). The sample uses
annualdata and coversthe years 1975-1998and all OECDcountriesexcept Iceland,Korea,Mexico,and
Turkey.Currentaccounts (as a percentageof GDP) are reportedby the OECD. We use three-month
interestrates,usually a Treasurybill rate,but an interbankrateif no governmentrateis available.These
FinancialStatisticsand the OECD.CPIinflationratesare based on IFSdata.
data come fromInternational
For the specification2 regressions,four countriesdid not reportmonthly interest-ratedata until after
the startof our sample. The countries,with their startingdates in parentheses,areSpain (1977),Greece
(1980),Portugal(1985),and Finland(1987).
*359
Macroeconomics
capture that agents can incorporate contemporaneous information into
forming inflation expectations. In both specifications we employ an
autoregressive correction. We report estimates for simple ordinary least
squares (OLS), a model with country fixed effects, and a model with
fixed effects and time dummies (the latter to capture global influences on
national real interest rates).
The results show highly significant negative correlations between the
current-account surplus and the real domestic interest rate, as our model
suggests. However, the two specifications differ somewhat in their numerical predictions, with specification 1 giving an effect that is substantially larger than that given by specification 2. Taking the regressions
with country fixed effects and time dummies as likely to be most reliable,
we see that a 1% of GDP rise in an OECD country's current-account
surplus is associated with roughly a 20- to 30-basis-point decline in its
real interest rate.17
4. ThePuzzleof HomeBiasin EquityPortfolios(Puzzle3)

Despite the rapid growth of international capital markets toward the
close of the twentieth century and a much expanded world market for
equities, stock-market investors maintain a puzzling preference for
home assets. When they first highlighted the extent of the home-bias
portfolio puzzle at the end of the 1980s, French and Poterba (1991) observed that Americans held roughly 94% of their equity wealth in the
U.S. stock market whereas the Japanese held roughly 98% of their equity
wealth at home.18 Figure 2, drawn from Tesar and Werner (1998), suggests that the home equity bias is muted for smaller countries and has
shown some tendency to decline over time-by the mid-1990s about
10% of U.S. equity wealth was invested abroad. Standard models of
optimal international portfolio diversification imply, however, that equity investors still have not diversified internationally nearly as much as
they should, and so the puzzle remains.19
17. We experimentedwith a numberof other specifications,expectedinflationproxies,and
time periods, almost always finding results similarto those reportedin Table3. Gordon
and Bovenberg(1996)also establish a relationshipbetween currentaccounts and real
interestrates for OECDcountries,but their test and their specificationaremotivatedby
a model that is very differentthan ours.
18. See also Golub (1990),who comparedgross internationalasset flows with gross domestic asset creationfor OECDcountries.
19. University of Californiainvestment policies illustrate the extent and persistence of
home bias even for large, sophisticated investors. On April 20, 2000, the U.C. regents
announced a revision in investment guidelines for the university's retirement and
endowment funds. The overall target portfolio share for equities remained at 65%,
but the recommended target share for non-U.S. equities, previously zero,was raised

1987-1996
Figure2 HOMEBIASIN EQUITYPORTFOLIOS:
26
24
22
, ,
. 16
|;~~~~~~~
-\-----
l- -I. --
16
.S 14
|
l
"
f10
2^^
(-Germany
-Canada
y^^"^^"*-
12
l
~-----
Japan
Xl.
4
1987
1987
1988
1988
1989
1989
990
1990
1991
1991
2
1992
13
1993
1994
1994
15
1995
1996
1996
From Tesar and Werner (1998)
Potential explanations range from nontraded factors such as human

capital (which may worsen or reduce the puzzle; see Baxter and Jermann,
1997) to nontraded consumption goods to asymmetries of information to
data inadequacy. Yet it is fair to say that none of the available stories alone
has provided a quantitatively satisfactory account of the observed home
bias; see Lewis (1999) for an up-to-date and thorough survey.
To set the stage for our discussion of trade costs, it is worthwhile
briefly reviewing what is perhaps the leading explanation, which is
based on the classic Salter-Swan traded-nontraded-goods dichotomy
we have already mentioned. While these two types of goods lie at polar
extremes in terms of their tradability, equity claims on either type of
industry can be frictionlessly traded. Thus, even though cement is
prohibitively costly to transport, there is nothing to stop foreign investors from buying shares in the domestic cement industry. Earnings, of
course, must be redeemed in traded goods, since nontradables cannot
be shipped to foreign equity holders by assumption. The key result one
gets out of this framework is that, for the baseline case of separable
to 7%. The positive target position in foreign equities, meant to "reduce risk and
broaden portfolio diversification while maintaining or improving investment performance," represents a substantial advance. It still falls far short, however, of the optimal
foreign equity share that simple models of international diversification would predict.
The Six Major Puzzles in InternationalMacroeconomics? 361
preferences (across the two types of good), investors hold a globally

diversified portfolio of traded-goods industries. But nontraded-goods
industries are held entirely domestically. The intuition is that, since
payments can only be made in traded goods and utility is separable,
there is no way to enhance risk sharing in tradables by linking the
allocation of tradables consumption to returns in nontraded-goods industries. (That intuition has to be modified for the case of nonseparable
preferences, but it is still a useful reference point.20) Thus, if nontraded
goods constitute, say, 50% of total output (a popular rule of thumb
based on the fact that for many OECD countries, services, construction,
and transport constitute roughly 50% of GDP; see Stockman and Tesar,
1995), then agents will (loosely speaking) hold more than half their
equity in home assets.
While elegant, this explanation still is not entirely satisfactory. First,
although it goes some way toward explaining home bias, it falls short of
explaining the 80% to 90% domestic equity shares we actually observe
(Figure 2). Second, the sharp dichotomy between traded and nontraded
goods is a contrived one, since in reality transport costs differ across
goods, and a particular good may or may not enter trade under different
market conditions. For most goods, tradability is not absolute and
tradedness is endogenous.21
Here we will take an approach based on intuition similar to that in the
preceding discussion. We explore just how far can one get in explaining
the home portfolio bias by explicitly introducing trade costs, rather than
splitting goods into two arbitrary and dichotomous categories. What we
will show is that, with a plausible elasticity of substitution across goods
and reasonable-sized costs for trading them, our model can produce a
very high and realistic level of home portfolio bias.
4.1 A SIMPLE MODEL
We now add uncertainty to the two-country general equilibrium version

of our model, with each country having a random endowment of its
distinct perishable consumption good, along the lines of Lucas (1982) or
Cole and Obstfeld (1991). To keep notation simple, we again abstract
from dynamics and consider a one-period portfolio problem. We assume a completely symmetric joint distribution for the national outputs
(YH YF).
A home or foreign individual chooses state-contingent consumptions

CHand CFof the home and foreign goods in order to maximize
20. Baxter,Jermann,and King (1998)develop some results for the case of nonseparable
preferences.
21. For a more thorough discussion, see Obstfeld and Rogoff (1996,Chapter5).

EU = E
1
1-p
-/
+ C(0-1)/
C8-1)/.
H
F
cl-p
\0/(f-1)~ -p
/
-1)_
=E
J
(11)
Above, C is the index of total real consumption [per equation (1)], 0 is

consumers' elasticity of substitution between the two goods, and p is
the coefficient of relative risk aversion.
There is free and costless international trade in a complete set of statecontingent Arrow-Debreu securities. (Imagine again that the securities'
payoffs are made in a costlessly tradable international monetary unit of
account.) We continue to assume that there are iceberg costs of trade,
such that only a fraction 1 - r of a unit of good shipped abroad reaches
its destination, so that under competitive markets PF = PF/(1 - r) and PH
= (1 - r)PH,per equations (2) and (3).22
Because, in addition, the countries are symmetric, free trade in
Arrow-Debreu securities yields an allocation in which
1 aU
1 aU
PHaCH
PH aCH
and
1 au
1 aU*
PF aCF
PF aCF
for every state of nature, or

CHV1C1/8-P= (1 - r)CZ-V0C*1/-P
(12)
and
(1 - r)C^F~/Cv'-p = CF-1/0 C*l/-P.
(13)
Together these conditions imply the ex post consumption efficiency

condition
PH
CF
CF
PH
The model is closed by the output-market clearing conditions:

22. Just as in our discussion of the trade-bias puzzle, one could obtain similar results on
home bias in equity holdings if trade costs were zero but there existed a home bias in
preferences along the lines of equation (7).

H = (1 - T)(YH- CH),
CF = (1 - r)(YF - CF)
Four of the preceding five equations are independent and yield solutions
for the consumption levels CH,CF,CH, and CF.
4.2 INTERPRETING
THEMODEL
It may puzzle some readers that we focus on the Arrow-Debreu allocation when in fact we are interested in relating our analysis to observed
trade in the narrower class of equity-type assets that one observes in the
real world. One rationale, perhaps, is that we do not want our theoretical home bias results to be driven by ad hoc assumptions about the kinds
of securities that can be traded, especially since many assets like debt
and direct foreign investment have complex optionlike qualities that
may be difficult to summarize in a simple model. A second, more pragmatic, rationale is that the equilibrium for the complete-markets case is
relatively simple to compute. A final rationale, as we shall see, is that for
realistic parameters, trade in equities alone can come quite close to attaining the complete-markets consumption allocation, so that the home bias
evident under complete markets is a good guide to the home bias in an
equities-only model.
4.3 EVALUATING
THEHOMEBIAS
It is helpful to begin by analyzing the special case p = 1/0, in which the
Arrow-Debreu conditions (12) and (13) simplify enormously. One can
also show that the Arrow-Debreu allocation is then identical to the one
in which people can trade only straight equity shares. Given our assumption of symmetry, the equilibrium portfolio shares are
1
XH
+ (1 -)1H
=
XH
(1
)0-1
Y-1
1 +
(1
(1 XF= Y,
1 + (1 -
1
+=1 + Y(
1 (-1
T)
y)0-1
r)o- F
-)0-1F
364 - OBSTFELD& ROGOFF

where XH (XF)denotes the home agent's share of total equity in the home
(foreign) industry, and XH (X*)denotes the foreigner's optimal equity
shares. Note that if we were to translate these equity positions into
consumption shares, we would find cF and cHlower than XF and X* by a
factor of 1 - r, reflecting the trade costs. Of course, in the absence of
trade costs all the portfolio (and consumption) shares would equal 0.5,
reflecting full diversification (under symmetry).
For 0 = 6 and trade costs of r = 0.25 (again, a seemingly reasonable
number when applied to all of output, especially compared to the usual
assumption that fully half of output is nontraded), one obtains XH= 0.81,
XH = 0.19. Since share prices will be equal due to symmetry, this implies
a home equity share of 81%. If 0 = 10, then the home portfolio share of
home equities is 72% even with trade costs of just 10%. (As in the case
of home bias in trade, there is significant nonlinearity: the elasticity of
foreign shareholdings with respect to trade costs is very high when r is
near 1, but falls as trade costs fall.) The preceding calculations constrain
the value of p to equal 1/0, but, as we shall now demonstrate numerically, the results turn out to be remarkably insensitive to this assumption, given realistic levels of output uncertainty.
If we relax our restriction p = 1/0, the exact conditions needed to
implement the Arrow-Debreu allocation through equity trade alone are
broken. Trade costs create an international wedge between marginal
rates of substitution such that standard stock-market spanning theorems
no longer apply.23 Nevertheless, one can still gain a good deal of insight
into home bias by computing the state-contingent consumptions of the
two goods in the Arrow-Debreu efficient allocation.
We can reduce the dimensionality of our numerical simulations by
noting that, in equilibrium, the ratios of consumption to output, H CH/
CF/YF, c - CH/YH, and cF = C*/YF, depend only on the output
YHJcF
ratio YH= YH/YF. Table 4 illustrates how the consumption ratios CH and CF
differ both across states of nature and across a number of settings of the
parameters r, 0, and p.24 (The values of cH and cFare apparent from the
assumed symmetry of the model.) Notice that the home country's output shares decline across states of nature as its relative endowment rises.
That pattern compensates the foreign country for the greater share of
transport costs it must pay in states of nature such that home output is
relatively high, and it is naturally more pronounced the higher the risk
aversion parameter p.
For the cases in which 0 = 6 and T is 10% or 20%, the table documents
23. See Obstfeld and Rogoff (1996, Section 5.3).
24. In a "baseline" model with trade frictions in which individuals nonetheless consume
the proceeds from fully diversified portfolios, we would have CH =? and F = (1 - r)/2.
*365
Macroeconomics
Table4 PORTFOLIOPOSITIONSIN HOMEAND FOREIGNGOODSFOR
STATEOF NATUREYHe YH/YF
Parameter
Portfolioshares
settings
T
H, CF
YH= 0.8
0.9
1.0
1.1
1.2
0.1
0.53, 0.43
0.53, 0.43
0.53, 0.43
0.53, 0.43
0.52, 0.42
0.1
0.56, 0.41
0.55, 0.40
0.55, 0.40
0.55, 0.40
0.1
0.1
0.1
5
6
6
2
1/0
2
0.55, 0.40
0.61, 0.37
0.63, 0.33
0.64, 0.35
0.61, 0.36
0.63, 0.33
0.63, 0.34
0.60, 0.36
0.63, 0.33
0.63, 0.33
0.60, 0.35
0.63, 0.33
0.62, 0.33
0.60, 0.35
0.63, 0.33
0.62, 0.32
0.1
0.2
0.2
0.2
0.2
0.3
0.3
6
2
6
6
6
6
8
5
2
1/0
2
5
2
2
0.64,
0.56,
0.75,
0.78,
0.78,
0.89,
0.95,
0.35
0.36
0.20
0.22
0.22
0.13
0.08
0.64,
0.56,
0.75,
0.76,
0.77,
0.87,
0.94,
0.34
0.36
0.20
0.21
0.21
0.11
0.07
0.63,
0.56,
0.75,
0.75,
0.75,
0.86,
0.92,
0.33
0.36
0.20
0.20
0.20
0.10
0.05
0.62,
0.55,
0.75,
0.74,
0.74,
0.84,
0.91,
0.33
0.35
0.20
0.19
0.18
0.09
0.04
0.62,
0.55,
0.75,
0.73,
0.73,
0.83,
0.89,
0.32
0.35
0.20
0.18
0.18
0.08
0.04
how insensitive the portfolio shares are even to large changes in p.

Because the results turn out to be fairly insensitive to p, we find that our
earlier calculations are indeed little affected by relaxing the assumption
pO = 1. The low sensitivity to p over the range of relative output outcomes in Table 4 is consistent with the conjecture by Cole and Obstfeld
(1991) that, for moderate uncertainty, the gains from global risk sharing
may be so low as to be mostly offset by costs of trade. Here, the equilibrium with a rich variety of assets is not so different from the one in which
individuals can hold only equity. Another conclusion we can draw from
these numbers is that trade costs have to be quite large before there is a
substantial discrepancy between the Arrow-Debreu consumption allocation and the one that trade in equities alone would produce. Even for
trade costs of 30%, an equity allocation that gave each country the same
consumption share in every state of nature as it would have in the
Arrow-Debreu equilibrium only when the realization was YH= 1 would
not entail a large departure from efficiency. As a result, even when pOf 1,
the home bias evident in the complete-markets example is quite close to
what a model of pure equity trade would imply.25
25. Backus,Kehoe, and Kydland (1992)reportsome relevant experimentswith their calibratedtwo-country,complete-marketsversion of the Brock-Mirmanstochasticgrowth
model. It is true that they do not focus on the equity home-biaspuzzle and that they
allow for only a single consumptiongood, effectivelymaking the elasticityof substitution between national outputs infinite. However, the fact that they find that moderate
transportationcosts produce an allocation close to that with full autarkyis quite in
accordwith our results here.

4.4 CAVEATS
We do not believe that trade costs in goods markets are necessarily the
whole story in explaining observed portfolio biases, and we certainly
expect that the kinds of information asymmetries and legal restrictions
emphasized in earlier work also play a role. These frictions can be viewed
as trade costs in a broader sense, as we have noted, and they can affect
portfolios through the trade-cost channel that we have emphasized in this
paper. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that our simple model based on the
trade-cost channel alone matches up so well to the data. As we have
noted, our explanation not only has the merit of (extreme) simplicity, but
is also more convincing because the same basic approach seems to help
explain such a diverse range of puzzles. Finally, we note that our results
are consistent with recent empirical work by Portes and Rey (1999). They
find that international trade in both equities and goods is surprisingly well
explained by an enhanced gravity model in which informational distance
proxies supplement the standard set of geographical explanatory variables.26 These results are certainly in accord with our model's prediction
that equity biases in large measure reflect goods-market biases.27
A caveat to our findings is that transaction costs, and the resulting
home bias, would be reduced somewhat in a fully dynamic model. Investors could then reinvest dividends abroad rather than repatriating them
immediately. As is true for a tax-deferred asset, they could earn dividends on wealth that would otherwise be burned up as shipping costs.
The question deserves further research. Dumas and Uppal (2000) develop a dynamic two-country growth model with shipping costs, but
their focus is on welfare rather than on the home-bias puzzle. (They also
assume 0 = 0o throughout by positing a single consumption good.) Our
guess is that trade costs will remain an important determinant of home
bias even in a realistic dynamic setting.
We have used a complete-markets model to illustrate how trade costs
can generate a home equity bias. By taking that modeling approach,
however, we certainly do not intend to endorse an empirical view that
26. Portes and Rey (1999) report that their informationvariables are quite significantin
explaininggoods-markettrade, even aftercontrollingfor geographicaldistance.
27. One considerationthat dovetails nicely with our explanationis illustratedin the model
of Martinand Rey (1999),which provides the closest antecedent to our approach.In
Martin and Rey's (endogenously) incomplete-marketssetup, the main driving force
behind home bias is that owners of home firms retaina disproportionateshare of their
equity in order to extract a higher monopoly price for remaining shares from other
agents. Martinand Rey focus on transactioncosts in asset ratherthan in goods markets, in the traditionof Aiyagariand Gertler(1991).They posit an asymmetrybetween
transactioncosts for home and foreign agents, and this cost also affectssharevalues. It
does not interactwith 0, however, so the effects are much smallerthan here.
*367
Macroeconomics
real-world asset markets are complete or nearly complete, either domestically or internationally. The complete-markets assumption is not essential, and our arguments would go through in a fully articulated incomplete-markets model, for example, one in which households have
unequal access to equity markets, so that only some hold equity (Mankiw
and Zeldes, 1991). The home-equity-bias puzzle has a strong empirical
basis that is independent of any narrow theoretical framework. The consumption correlations puzzle, which we turn to next, encompasses a
broader notion of market completeness, but its exact formulation is also
more model-specific.
Puzzle
Correlations
5. TheInternational
Consumption
(Puzzle4)
If one believes that both domestic and international capital markets are
well approximated by an Arrow-Debreu complete-markets framework,
then it is a puzzle that international consumption growth correlations are
not much higher than they appear to be. In an Arrow-Debreu world,
country-specific output risks should be significantly pooled, and therefore domestic per capita consumption growth should not depend too
heavily on country-specific income shocks. Of course, in some sense, the
consumption correlations puzzle is almost a corollary of the FeldsteinHorioka and home-equity-bias puzzles. Given that the most transparent
and equity trade-are
market means of consumption smoothing-debt
far less operative across borders than within them, it should not come as
any great surprise that international consumption correlations are low.
However, there are many reasons for thinking about consumption correlations independently. One is that we have only very imperfect measures of international trade in equity and debt, and another is that there
may be other market channels, such as direct investment, for pooling risk.
The international consumption correlations puzzle has spawned a variety of subpuzzles. Backus, Kehoe, and Kydland (1992) highlight the fact
that international output growth rates are actually more highly correlated than consumption growth rates. Backus and Smith (1993) note that
in a world with traded and nontraded goods, efficient risk sharing calls
for giving higher rates of consumption growth to countries that experience relative drops in the real price of consumption. (Very loosely speaking, the United States and Canada should write contracts that imply big
transfers to Canada in states of nature where the Canadian dollar is very
weak so that Canadians can exploit bargain Canadian prices, and vice
versa when the Canadian dollar is high.)
As we shall see, most consumption correlations puzzles tend to be

quite model-specific (depending on factors like the completeness of
markets and the exact form of the utility function), so they are not quite
as obviously puzzles about the real world in the same way that, say,
the equity-home-bias puzzle is. One does not have to believe that the
world is Arrow-Debreu to think it a puzzle that agents do not take
more advantage of international diversification opportunities. Nevertheless, consumption correlation puzzles play a very important role in
assessing alternative general equilibrium models, and, at a more fundamental level, we can ask why consumption risk pooling tends to be
higher across regions within a country's boundaries than across national boundaries.
5.1 THEPUZZLEOF LOWINTERNATIONAL
CONSUMPTIONCORRELATIONS
Consider a single-good world with time-separable preferences in which
all agents have identical period utility functions of the form u(C) = C'-p/
(1 - p). Then, if there are no trade costs, trade in a complete set of
Arrow-Debreu securities would imply that home and foreign consumption growth rates are equalized:
Ct?1 C*1
C,
C?
(14)
regardless of relative shocks to home and foreign outputs. (See Obstfeld

and Rogoff, 1996, Chapter 5.) This is hardly what one observes in practice, as Table 5, which gives consumption growth-rate correlations based
on Penn World Table data from the Group of Seven industrial countries,
illustrates. The strong prediction of equation (14) is relaxed somewhat in
models where utility depends nonseparably on both consumption and
leisure. However, in this case, the benchmark frictionless world economy model of Backus, Kehoe, and Kydland (1992) still predicts a crosscountry consumption correlation of almost 0.9, far above the correlations
we see in the table.
Since, as we have already noted, the low-consumption-correlation puzzle is virtually a corollary of the previous two puzzles we have studied,
the reader will hardly be surprised when we note that introducing trade
costs works just as well in explaining it. Indeed, our model of the equityhome-bias puzzle can easily generate correlations of the sort seen in
Table 5.28
28. Lewis (1999) points out that when a significant share of output is absolutely nontradable, international consumption correlations will be sharply reduced. However,
*369
Macroeconomics
IN PERCAPITAPRIVATECONSUMPTION
Table5 CORRELATIONS
GROWTH,1973-1992
France
Canada
France
Germany
Italy
Japan
U.K.
0.25
Germany
0.31
0.52
Italy
Japan
U.K.
U.S.
0.44
0.27
0.27
0.05
0.68
0.40
0.21
0.40
0.43
0.33
0.30
0.59
0.64
0.51
0.51
0.13
0.50
0.65
Source:Penn WorldTable.Correlationsof log differencesin per capitareal consumption.Simple average of correlationcoefficientsis 0.40.
5.2 THEBACKUS-SMITHPUZZLE
Backus and Smith (1993) derive a generalization of equation (14) that
holds when trade is costly and, as a consequence, national price levels
for the consumption baskets entering u(C) generally differ. Let P denote
the home price level and P* the foreign price level, with both price levels
measured in the same numeraire currency. As in the last section, currency and securities can be traded without transport costs even though
goods are costly to trade. Then complete markets in state contingent
assets ensure that growth rates in the marginal utility of currency-the
medium in which state-contingent insurance payments are made-are
equalized across countries. If the utility-of-consumption function exhibits constant relative risk aversion and is independent of leisure, as in
equation (11), that equality implies
C-P /
Ct+l /t+l
CtP/Pt
P*
I
C t+-I/Pt+1l
= / Pt(
(15)
This generalizes equation (14) in that P = P* absent international trade

frictions.
Given the high volatility of real exchange rates under floating together
with the low volatility of consumption, it is perhaps not surprising that
Backus and Smith's empirical work forcefully rejects the optimal risksharing condition (15). In fact, the empirical rejection of condition (15) is
Stockman and Tesar (1995) observe that, insofar as the data can be trusted, international consumption correlations for apparently tradable goods are not appreciably
higher than those for goods generally classified as nontradable. Their finding supports
the view that the dichotomous distinction between tradables and nontradables is overdrawn, and simultaneously suggests that there are substantial impediments to international risk sharing in traded goods.

even more devastating, since even very high values of p cannot reconcile
that condition with the data. One possible explanation is that their assumption that preferences are separable in consumption and leisure is
too strong, so that one needs to look instead at a generalized version of
(15). In our view, however, incompleteness of asset markets is the major
reason why condition (15) fails so miserably in practice. Indeed, given
the volatility of exchange rates, the size of transfers required for (15) to
hold would require a level of risk sharing even greater than we observe
in domestic markets.
The alert reader will note that a version of the Backus-Smith condition
will hold in a dynamic extension of our earlier model of the home-equitybias puzzle. That model implicitly assumed flexible nominal prices, and
would not produce nearly the level of real-exchange-rate volatility one
sees in the data. We do not take this as damning, since for us the
complete-markets assumption was only a useful device for calibration,
and not a conviction. Trade costs would play essentially the same role in
a world with, say, trade in debt and equities but not a complete set of
Arrow-Debreu securities. Indeed, in the context of this paper, the really
interesting issue is not why international consumption correlations are
difficult to replicate in a complete-markets model, but the extent to
which consumption risk sharing is less prevalent across distinct countries than within countries.
OF DOMESTICVS.
5.3 INCOMPLETENESS
MARKETS
INTERNATIONAL
Certainly, empirical studies based on domestic micro data reject resoundingly the proposition that markets are complete. For example, Attanasio
and Davis (1996) find that consumption risk sharing is strikingly incomplete within the United States, and for reasons that apparently are unrelated to asymmetric information. The question the present paper raises
is whether risk sharing is even more impaired internationally than domestically due to costs of specifically international trade. Our discussion
of home equity bias, which does not rely fundamentally on a completemarkets assumption, suggests that this should be the case, since regional equity bias seems to be far less than the strong national home bias
that we see in international data. Backus and Smith's theoretical proposition points in the same direction.
A growing body of empirical evidence supports the prediction that
financial markets are less effective in promoting risk sharing among countries than among regions within a country. A full review of this literature
would take us too far afield, but we can mention briefly a few relevant
papers. Atkeson and Bayoumi (1993), in one of the first empirical studies
in this area, find that regional financial transfers within the United States
*371
Macroeconomics
are much larger than those among the major industrial countries. A comparison of the variance-decomposition results of Asdrubali, Sorensen,
and Yosha (1996) on the United States with those of Sorensen and Yosha
(1998) on the OECD suggests that financial markets play a much bigger
role in consumption smoothing among U.S. states than is the case among
industrial countries. Crucini (1999), using an alternative method, concludes that Canadian provinces pool risks more effectively than U.S. regions, and that either country shows more internal risk pooling than does
the sample of industrial countries. Bayoumi and Klein (1997) find that
Canadian provinces display more financial integration with each other
than with the outside world.29
So there indeed is a puzzle as to why intranational consumption risk
sharing is more efficient than international risk sharing, but it can be
resolved in the same manner as we have resolved the home-bias and
Feldstein-Horioka puzzles.
OF INTERNATIONAL
CORRELATIONS
5.4 THERELATIVE
CONSUMPTIONAND OUTPUTGROWTHRATES
Backus, Kehoe and Kydland (1992) emphasize the puzzle that empirical
consumption correlations are actually lower than output correlations.
That pattern holds in the Penn World Table data analyzed here: the
average international correlation in per capita real GDP growth rates is
0.53 over 1973-1992, while the corresponding average consumption correlation is only 0.40.
Our model, on its own, does not offer a new rationalization of their
finding. However, we do not consider this to be a fundamental problem,
since the existence of international risk sharing need not generate higher
correlation among consumptions than outputs across countries. The reason is that only the output remaining after investment and government
consumption can be shared by private consumers. Thus, a more appropriate comparison to assess the degree of global risk sharing is that
between international consumption correlations and correlations in
growth rates of output net of investment and government consumption
(Y - I - G). Table 6 reports these correlations for the same sample period
and data set used to construct Table 5. The average international correlation in the growth of Y - I - G is 0.17, far below the average correlation
0.40 of international consumption growth rates. For six of the 21 country
pairs that ranking is reversed, but in most of these cases the discrepancy
is not significant.
So in fact, the puzzle concerning the relative variability of output and
29. Obstfeld (1995) adds a number of caveats to some of this literature.
372 *OBSTFELD & ROGOFF

Table 6 CORRELATIONS IN PER CAPITA Y - I - G GROWTH, 1973-1992
France
Canada
France
Germany
Italy
Japan
U.K.
0.17
Germany
U.K.
U.S.
Italy
Japan
0.19
0.36
-0.18
0.50
0.66
0.13
0.34
0.19
0.20
-0.19
-0.31
0.02
0.13
0.33
-0.25
0.11
0.18
0.46
-0.22
0.73
Source:Penn WorldTable.Correlationsof log differencesin per capitareal GDP net of investmentand

governmentconsumption.Simple averageof correlationcoefficientsis 0.17.
consumption is not necessarily incompatible with a high level of international asset market integration. Indeed, using a dynamic new openeconomy macroeconomic model, Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan (1998)
are able to produce realistic cross-country correlations of output as well
as of consumption.30 The main additional assumptions that lie behind
their results include sticky nominal prices and, implicitly, transport costs
high enough to result in segmented national output markets. Both transport costs and nominal rigidities are central to the resolution of the fifth
and sixth puzzles, to which we now turn.
6. ThePurchasing-Power-Parity
Puzzle(Puzzle5) and the
Puzzle
Disconnect
(Puzzle6)
Exchange-Rate
Our last two puzzles differ from the preceding ones in being fundamentally about the real effects of a nominal variable-the exchange rate,
which is the relative price of currencies. Here, also in contrast to the
preceding four puzzles, the difficulty seems to lie primarily in explaining
short- to medium-term phenomena rather than phenomena that persist
over very long periods. (The Feldstein-Horioka puzzle, for example, is
typically framed using decade-average data). Finally, the last two puzzles can be viewed as pricing puzzles, because they refer to price behavior, including the dynamic covariation between prices and other macroeconomic variables.
Any realistic attempt to address these pricing puzzles formally would
require a much more elaborate framework than the one we have used thus
far, incorporating, among other things, elements of monopoly and sticky
30. In the Chari-Kehoe-McGrattan sticky-price model, highly correlated national monetary shocks can make national outputs covary more closely than national consumptions. Highly correlated monetary shocks, however, also tend to reduce real-exchange-
rate variabilitycounterfactuallyin the model. We suspect that an extended version of

the model could handle the latterproblem.
*373
Macroeconomics
nominal prices for goods and/or labor. In fact, there is already a great deal
of exciting research along these lines now taking place [see, for example,
the recent survey by Lane (2001) on the new open-economy macroeconomics]. Unfortunately, we do not have nearly enough space remaining here to present a fully articulated model. Nevertheless, we will try to
make clear why trade costs are as essential to resolving the pricing puzzles
as they are to resolving puzzles 1 through 4, which are quantity puzzles.
The first pricing puzzle we take up is the purchasing-power-parity
(PPP) puzzle (Rogoff, 1996), which highlights just how weak the connection is between exchange rates and national price levels. It is based on
the observation that in hundreds of studies, using widely varying techniques and data sets, researchers have repeatedly found very long halflives-on the order of 3 to 4 years-for shocks to real (CPI) exchange
rates. As we shall explain, half-lives of this magnitude are hard to understand if financial-market disturbances with only transitory real effects
are very important in explaining short-run volatility.
Our term for the second pricing puzzle is the exchange-ratedisconnect
puzzle, a name that alludes broadly to the exceedingly weak relationship
(except, perhaps, in the longer run) between the exchange rate and
virtually any macroeconomic aggregates. It manifests itself in a variety of
ways. For example, Meese and Rogoff (1983) showed that standard
macroeconomic exchange-rate models, even with the aid of ex post data
on the fundamentals, forecast exchange rates at short to medium horizons no better than a naive random walk. Baxter and Stockman (1989)
argued that transitions to floating-exchange-rate regimes lead to sharp
increases in nominal- and real-exchange-rate variability with no corresponding changes in the distributions of fundamental macroeconomic
variables.31 (The PPP puzzle is really just an example, albeit a very important one, of the broader exchange-rate disconnect puzzle.)
A critical difference between the (relatively short-term) pricing puzzles and the (longer-term) quantity puzzles is that we can no longer
appeal to high elasticities of substitution to lever up the effects of
modest-sized trade costs. (At the very least, the connection is no longer
as simple and direct.) If there are only modest obstacles to short-term
price arbitrage across borders, there can be only modest short-term price
differentials. In fact, at the consumer level, arbitrage costs are likely to be
rather large, and, after all, most goods embody very large nontraded
content once they reach consumers at the retail level. But one cannot
make this argument for wholesale importers who trade in bulk, so here
31. Flood and Rose (1995) extend Baxter and Stockman's results and arrive at similar
conclusions.

we need a more nuanced discussion. As we shall see, importer-level
prices do appear to exhibit somewhat less anomalous behavior than do
consumer-level prices.
6.1 THEPPP PUZZLE
Let Q be the real exchange rate between two countries, and consider the
regression equation
log Qt = a + 7qt+ y log Qt-1 +
E,,
where et is a random disturbance. The real exchange rate, Q, is defined

as WP*/P using overall CPI data for price levels, where the nominal
exchange rate % is the price of foreign currency in terms of home currency. (In deference to conventional usage, we now switch notation and
use P to denote the domestic price level measured in home currency and
P* the foreign price level measured in foreign currency.)
Using monthly 1973-1995 data for Canada, France, Germany, Japan,
and the United States, and constructing all 10 possible real exchange
rates in this sample, we find values of y ranging from 0.99 (U.S.Canada, implying a half-life of 69 months) to 0.97 (Germany-Japan,
implying a half-life of 21 months). The mean half-life across these real
exchange rates is around 39 months, or 3- years.32
Such long half-lives would not necessarily be a puzzle but for the
remarkable volatility of real and nominal exchange rates, volatility that
seems hard to explain without assigning a major role to monetary and
financial shocks. If monetary and financial shocks are the predominant
source of volatility, however, it is hard to imagine what source of nominal rigidity could be so persistent as to explain the prolongation of realexchange-rate deviations. This is the PPP puzzle.
6.2 THE PPP PUZZLEFOR TRADABLESVERSUSNONTRADABLES
One might think that the slow mean reversion just documented applies
primarily to goods with extremely high international trade costs,
whereas, at least for goods that are heavily traded, mean reversion in
relative international consumer prices might be more rapid. That is not
the case, however, as documented most strikingly by Engel (1999).
If we are willing to set our qualms aside temporarily and adopt a
conventional dichotomy of traded versus nontraded consumer goods,
we can use Figure 3 to illustrate the empirical significance of the distinc32. Data on end-of-month nominal exchange rates and on consumer price indexes come
from InternationalFinancial Statistics.
*375
Macroeconomics
tion for real-exchange-rate dynamics. The figure is based on monthly
1962-1995 data from Engel (1999, Section I) for the United States, France,
Germany, and Japan. The overall real exchange rate Q = WP*/Pis compared with relative price indexes for tradables and nontradables, *P~/PT
and fPN/PN, where we adopt Engel's disaggregation of OECD sectoral
CPI data into tradable and nontradable subindexes.33 Each panel of the
figure plots the correlations of percentage changes between pairs of
relative prices, where the number of months over which the data are
differenced is measured on the horizontal axis.
Consistent with Engel's results, the data reveal no significant difference between short-term and long-term correlations, indicating extremely slow mean reversion in shocks to the relative prices of tradables.
Interestingly, it seems to make rather little difference whether we use
tradables or nontradables prices to compute real exchange rates: all the
price ratios are highly correlated with each other even out to horizons of
five years. Engel's results focused on the U.S. real exchange rate against
various trading partners, but as one can see from the figure, the results
are (almost) as striking for a pairing of Germany and Japan. Other nonU.S. pairings that we have examined look similar.
We have argued that the traded-nontraded-goods distinction is much
too finely drawn-at the retail level, many "traded" goods already embody very large nontraded components, and the dividing line is arbitrary and likely endogenous. It is nevertheless surprising just how little
difference there is between the measures of real exchange rates in Figure
3. These findings probably cannot be ascribed merely to price aggregation problems, since many researchers report similar sluggish responses
even for relatively disaggregated data on consumer goods that are commonly perceived as highly tradable. (See, for example, Isard, 1977; Giovannini, 1988; and Engel and Rogers, 1996.) The results certainly seem to
suggest that even over the medium term, the consumer prices of supposedly tradable goods are nearly as insulated from the forces of international arbitrage as are the consumer prices of nontradables.
6.3 ADJUSTMENTIS FASTERAT THEPRODUCERLEVEL
It is important to emphasize that there seems to be considerably more
adjustment of prices to exchange-rate changes at the importer level than
at the consumer level. In their excellent survey of the empirical literature
on exchange rates and international prices, Goldberg and Knetter (1997)
conclude that the passthrough of exchange rates to relative international
prices is about 50% after one year, much faster than what we have just
33. See Appendix A of Engel (1999).Figure3 looks much the same if attentionis restricted
to data from the floating-exchange-rateperiod, 1973-1995.

Figure 3
U.S. and Germany
1
a)
C
en
r"~"---".."""xxx"~"~"^
*b----bo
cX 0.99
C
) 0.98
0)
0-
o 0.97
0
X 0.96
o
0.95
10
40
30
20
Time horizon for changes (months)
60
50
U.S. and France

1
0)
0)
0.99
0
.-5
ca
0.98
0.
o0c
._
C
cCo
I-)l~kW~CICIIWll~kklC~kl
----
_~)
__
-l
L.
Il)
~
A
-l
?.
0.97
0.96
0.95
0.94
()
20
10
30
50
40
60
-,
Q and EPt*/Pt
- Q and EPn*/Pn
--
EPt*/Ptand EPn*/Pn
seen in the consumer-price data. Thus, relatively large elasticities in

international trade between exporters and importers can be consistent
with exceedingly sluggish adjustment in the relative consumer prices of
tradables.
Obstfeld and Rogoff (2000) observe that if this were not the case-if
prices paid by importers moved as sluggishly as prices paid by con-
The Six Major Puzzles in InternationalMacroeconomics?377

Figure 3 continued
U.S. and Japan
0)
co
0.98
0.96
|
Q4)
o 0.94
0
X-
0.92
0.9
10
20
30
40
50
60
50
60
Germany and Japan

0 0.98
O
,
()
0.961I
0.94
-0 0.92
*? 0.9
'. 0.88
0.86
10
20
30
40
Q andEPt*/Pt
_-
Q andEPn*/Pn
EPt*/Pt
andEPn*/Pn
sumers-a
country's terms of trade would actually improve, rather than
worsen, after a depreciation of the exchange rate. For example, if the dollar depreciates against the pound and all prices are sticky, the dollar price
paid by Americans for British goods remains fixed whereas the price paid
by British citizens for American goods rises when translated into dollars.
They find that this does not seem to be the case empirically, and instead

find significant support for the conventional view-that exchange-rate depreciation worsens the term of trade of the depreciating country.
6.4 TRADECOSTSAND PRICINGTO MARKET
Whereas the home bias in trade could, in principle, be explained simply
by a home bias in preferences, the failure of markets to arbitrage international price differentials for seemingly identical goods cannot. The most
popular explanation of persistent international price differentials argues
that most goods are supplied monopolistically, and that (by assumption)
monopoly producers have very broad scope to price to marketby charging
different prices in home and foreign markets (see, for example, Dornbusch, 1987; Krugman, 1987; Betts and Devereux, 1996; Bergin and
Feenstra, 2000; or Devereux and Engel, 2000). Goldberg and Knetter
(1997) survey a large body of supportive empirical evidence.
This explanation of international price differences for very similar or
identical goods is appealing, but incomplete. What is to prevent consumers from arbitraging between home and foreign prices? Any explanation-and the pricing-to-market literature offers many; see Dornbusch
(1987)-has to be consistent with the tenuous connection between exchange rates and the relative prices for virtually any type of consumer
good. Rationales for pricing to market that might make sense for bigticket items such as cars (the steering wheels on American and Japanese
cars are on opposite sides, dealers can refuse warranty service for vehicles purchased abroad, etc.) are not very appealing when applied to, say,
basic clothing items.
In our view, trade costs simply must play a central role in any explanation of international price differentials. However, to make sense of the
price data, we must refine our earlier discussion of trade costs to distinguish between bulk wholesale and individual consumer trade costs. We
must also think carefully about the ability of producers to control interthe
national distribution chains at the wholesale level. Otherwise-if
trade
and
were
moderate
home
markets
between
foreign
only wedge
costs-one would only observe moderate price differentials.
6.5 WHOLESALEBULKVS. RETAILINDIVIDUAL
TRANSSHIPPINGCOSTS
At the consumer level, it is likely that for many goods, trading costs are
in fact quite large, and far, far larger than trading costs faced by bulk
wholesale shippers. (Individual consumers cannot profitably arbitrage
even large differences in Coca-Cola prices across countries, but bulk
wholesalers can.) The real question is what prevents international price
arbitrage at the wholesale level. One answer is that in many cases, a firm
The Six Major Puzzles in InternationalMacroeconomics* 379
can establish legal rights to control distribution of its product in different

countries. Exclusive national marketing licenses are extremely common.
For example, to protect its ability to price-discriminate across home and
foreign markets, the Coca-Cola company sued a couple of small American wholesalers who, during the late 1990s, were trying to arbitrage the
difference between Coca-Cola's $11.50-per-case wholesale price in Japan
(as of January 2000) and its wholesale $5.50-per-case price in the United
States-a differential far in excess of bulk shipping costs.34 True, for
small firms, the costs of establishing sole country distribution rights, and
even more the legal costs of enforcing such rights, are likely to be prohibitive. Such firms also are likely to deal only with a very small number of
bulk wholesalers, however, so it is still quite possible that they can pricediscriminate, either by exploiting long-term relationships with their
downstream wholesalers or even by taking over more portions of their
wholesale distribution network.
6.6 PRICINGTO MARKETAND THEPPP PUZZLE
To explain the data adequately, one must flesh out many details that we
are omitting here. Very simple models of the kind we used in the first four
sections are simply not adequate. For example, it is well known that with
constant elasticities of demand, a monopolist may charge different prices
in different countries, but exchange-rate changes will not cause fluctuations in relative prices charged [see Dornbusch (1987) and Marston (1990)
for partial equilibrium models, and Betts and Devereux (1996), Obstfeld
and Rogoff (1996, Chapter 10), and Hau (2000a) for general equilibrium
models]. The nature of price rigidities is also quite important; Devereux
and Engel (2000) emphasize that to make sense of the consumer-price
data, one must think of final consumer goods prices as being sticky largely
in domestic-currency terms for both domestically produced goods and
importables.
Once one allows for pricing to market, however, it does become possible to develop models that can generate large price differentials exhibiting considerable persistence. Leading examples of such models are in
Bergin and Feenstra (2001) and Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan (1998),
both of which develop new open-economy macroeconomic models with
rich price dynamics. These authors do not explicitly base their models
on trade costs-they do not try to rationalize the existence of pricing to
market, but just assume it-so trade costs are only implicit. An example
of a model with explicit trade costs is given by Dumas (1992), who
observes that moderate trade costs can generate real-exchange-rate per34. See Constance L. Hays, "In Japan, What Price Coca-Cola?" New YorkTimes, January 26,
2000, p. C1.

sistence even in a competitive world of fully flexible prices. However,
the Dumas model cannot simultaneously generate anywhere near the
volatility and persistence needed to match the data. Monopoly and
nominal rigidities appear to be essential elements of any resolution of
the PPP puzzle.35
Finally, one should note that in the presence of trade costs, econometric
estimates of the half-life of real-exchange-rate movements may be exaggerated. Price differentials dissipate very slowly within transaction-cost
bands, but more quickly outside them, and proper econometric estimation should take these nonlinearities into account (see Michael, Nobay,
and Peel, 1997; Obstfeld and Taylor, 1997; and Taylor, 2001).36
6.7 THEEXCHANGE-RATE
DISCONNECTPUZZLE
The same reasoning we have applied to thinking about the PPP puzzle
can be applied to a much broader range of puzzles, all relating to
the remarkably weak short-term feedback links between the exchange
rate and the rest of the economy. We term this broader class of puzzles
the exchange-ratedisconnectpuzzle. In a sense, the PPP puzzle is simply a
very important special example of this broader class of phenomena. Of
course, one may well ask why the exchange-rate disconnect puzzle
should be any different from the stock-pricedisconnectpuzzle, that is, the
fact that stock markets seem to gyrate wildly without having any sizable
contemporaneous effects on the real economy. We ourselves (Obstfeld
and Rogoff, 1996, Chapter 9) have argued that to understand exchangerate volatility, one ultimately needs a broader model that explains the
high volatility we seem to observe in all asset markets. While we still
maintain that view, it is also true that the links between the exchange
rate and the real economy are much more direct than for stock prices. In
most economies, the exchange rate is the single most important relative
price, one that potentially feeds back immediately into a large range of
transactions. Because the potential links are so direct, it is surprising
indeed that they are not stronger.
Though much work remains to be done, it appears to us that a framework such as the one we have outlined earlier in this section (under
puzzle 5) holds great potential for explaining the other disconnect puzzles as well. For example, exchange rates are remarkably volatile relative
to any model we have of underlying fundamentals such as interest rates,
35. Working in a competitive flexible-price model with transport costs, Ravn and Mazzenga
(1999) are also unable to rationalize both the real-exchange-rate volatility and the realexchange-rate persistence in the data. Ohanian and Stockman (1997) develop an exploratory theoretical model of trade costs in a flexible-price monetary model.
36. Rogoff (1996) posits trading-cost bands as an essential element of any explanation of
the PPP puzzle.
*381
Macroeconomics
outputs, and money supplies, and no model seems to be very good at
explaining exchange rates even ex post. The traditional thinking is that
even though a broad range of goods is nontraded, there is always a
broad range of goods that are traded, and these tie down the exchange
rate. But a recurring theme here is that markets for most "traded" goods
are not fully integrated, and segmentation due to various trade costs can
be quite pervasive. In fact, the spectrum of goods subject to low trade
costs may be very narrow.
In the type of model we described earlier in this section, a financialmarket shock that moves the exchange rate may have little economic
effect even over a fairly long horizon. With pervasive pricing to market
at the retail level, consumers will be largely insulated from exchange-rate
effects until these have had the time to feed through to wholesale import
prices and, from there, to retailers. The magnitude of the PPP puzzle
suggests how long that process might take.
Thus, interacting with the segmentation caused by trade costs, nominal price rigidities can produce a disconnect in which the exchange rate
responds wildly to shocks. With the prices of most goods preset in local
currency and real variables such as aggregate consumption largely insulated from exchange rates in the short run, exchange-rate adjustments
have minimal short-run economic effects and therefore must be huge to
clear financial markets. Only gradually will the responses of importers
and exporters feed through to the retail level-and
the adjustments
well
be
in
too
slow
to
be
the
kinds
of
tests
picked
might
up
performed by
Baxter and Stockman (1989). High volatility and the exchange-rate disconnect therefore both result from a combination of trade costs (costs
that are especially high for consumers), monopoly, and pricing to market
in local currency. A full model would incorporate those factors, while
also modeling fully the dynamics of price adjustment through retail
distribution networks, as well as other channels through which exchange rates might affect the real economy.37
We do not have space to explore the many implications that this intriguing class of models suggests. Can heightened exchange-rate volatility due to transport costs act to further segment markets internationally,
with a resulting multiplier effect on volatility?38 What are the welfare
37. Engel (1996) proposes that if all consumer prices are preset in local currency and firms
fully hedge currency risks, exchange-rate changes will have no real effects and therefore exchange rates will be indeterminate. Hau (2000b) develops a new open-economy
macroeconomic model in which exchange-rate volatility is decreasing in the degree of
openness to international trade.
38. The theoretical work of Bacchetta and van Wincoop (1998) and Obstfeld and Rogoff
(1998, 2000) and the empirical work of Obstfeld and Taylor (1997) and Rose (2000)
suggest that currency volatility may itself act as a barrier to international trade.
costs of the exchange-rate disconnect? But the general approach strikes

us as a very promising and realistic way to think about a host of
exchange-rate volatility puzzles.
7. Conclusions
The need for research on the effects of trade costs in standard models of
international finance seems compelling to us. We find that introducing
plausible proportional (iceberg) trade costs into the most standard international macroeconomics models substantially resolves many of the core
empirical puzzles in the field, including especially the (seemingly intractable) Feldstein-Horioka puzzle, the home-bias-in-equities puzzle, the
home-bias-in-trade puzzle, and the low-consumption-correlations puzzle. We cannot claim the same degree of success in elucidating pricing
puzzles as in the case of quantity puzzles, at least not with the kind of very
simple models we have featured here. To tackle the PPP puzzle and the
exchange-rate disconnect puzzle properly, a much richer framework featuring imperfect competition and wage-price rigidities is needed (therefore one in which, at a very fundamental level, neither domestic nor
international markets are perfect). It is also necessary to build in a distinction between retail and wholesale pricing to account for the sharply different behavior of terms-of-trade indexes vs. consumer price indexes in
response to exchange-rate changes (see Obstfeld and Rogoff, 2000, and
Tille, 2000). We have argued, however, that introducing trade costs (implicitly or explicitly) must be an essential ingredient in resolving the international pricing puzzles as well. Richer models might consider fixed costs
of trade as well as the proportional costs on which we have focused here.39
Although we take an eclectic perspective on the degree of completeness of international capital markets, our analysis does not rely on the
assumption that their performance is intrinsically inferior to that of domestic capital markets (at least not in analyzing data for OECD countries). Our focus, instead, is on the distinctive ramifications for assetmarket performance of the imperfect integration of goods markets. One
attractive feature of our approach is that it is entirely consistent with the
observation that gross flows in international capital markets are much
larger than the small net flows.
An obvious potential criticism of our central theme is that transport
technology has been steadily improving over the past half century, and
tariffs have fallen dramatically, especially among the OECD countries.
Has the home bias in trade and equities lessened, and are the consump39. O'Connell and Wei (1997) give an example of a theoreticalmodel of price arbitrage
involving fixed as well as variablecosts.
*383
Macroeconomics
tion-correlations and Feldstein-Horioka puzzles less acute than they
were half a century ago? The short answer is that trade, capital movements, and equity flows all haveexpanded sharply since 1950, so the major
quantity puzzles are less acute. For example, the ratio of total trade (the
sum of imports and exports) to GDP has roughly doubled across the
OECD between 1950 and 1995; for the United States, it has risen from 9%
in 1950 to 24% in 1995.40 (This calculation may significantly understate
the true growth rate, since a large fraction of trade is in manufactures, the
relative price of which has been falling over time.) And, as we have
already seen, OECD savings-investment correlations have fallen significantly (from 0.89 for 1960-1974 to 0.60 for 1990-1997), while holdings of
foreign equity have risen sharply (for the United States, from a 4% share
in 1987 to a 10% share in 1996). At the same time, while transport technology has steadily improved, labor costs have risen sharply, so there is
actually some debate about whether net transport costs have fallen. Hummels (1999b) argues that, until recently, the overall effect has been relatively small, with shipping costs falling sharply for bulk commodities but
actually rising for manufactures, which account for over 70% of OECD
trade. Greenspan (1989), on the other hand, emphasizes that trade is
getting lighter, as many of the goods and services being traded today are
highly knowledge-intensive. Overall, the data for the past half century
certainly do not provide any prima facie case against our approach.
It would be interesting to look at time spans beyond just the past fifty
years, so that trend declines in trade costs become more pronounced.
Williamson (2000) calculates that transport costs for internationally
traded goods fell by 1.5% per annum in real terms from 1850 to 1913,
with the rate slowing down substantially over 1913-1950. Although prewar data are much thinner than postwar, and although there are many
other factors to control for (large fluctuations in tariff rates, decolonization, wars, changes in the international monetary regime, etc.), this
would nevertheless be a useful exercise. Cross-sectional empirical work
is also needed.
Finally, a small apology to readers who were expected us also to address the forward-premium puzzle. We simply have not yet tackled this
particular pricing puzzle, which we regard as much more of a pure
finance question than a macroeconomic puzzle (and hence this paper's
title). We note, however, that Dumas (1992) has produced a model of the
forward premium in which trade costs do pull in the right direction, so
getting a trade-cost model with the right quantitative effects may indeed
be possible.
40. The only outliers are Australia and Japan, with trade ratios that remained roughly
constant between 1950 and 1995 at 40% and 19%, respectively. See Baldwin and Martin
(1999) or World Bank, WorldDevelopmentReport, 1995.
Appendix
Table 7 presents
saving and investment
rates by country for 1990-1997.
Table 7 SAVING AND INVESTMENT RATES, 1990-1997

Country
NS/Ya
I/yb
OECDC
Switzerland
Japan
Norway
Singapore
Denmark
Iceland
United States
Germany
Austria
Belgium
Sweden
France
Netherlands
Finland
United Kingdom
Australia
Italy
Canada
Ireland
0.29
0.33
0.27
0.50
0.17
0.16
0.15
0.21
0.23
0.22
0.15
0.20
0.25
0.18
0.14
0.17
0.19
0.16
0.21
0.23
0.30
0.23
0.36
0.15
0.17
0.17
0.22
0.24
0.18
0.16
0.19
0.21
0.18
0.15
0.22
0.19
0.18
0.19
1
1
1
Countries with GNP/cap.d > 18,000 (ave.)
0.22
0.21
New Zealand
Israel
Spain
Greece
Korea
Portugal
0.16
0.07
0.20
0.15
0.35
0.22
0.19
0.24
0.22
0.17
0.37
0.22
Countries with GNP/cap. 5000-18,000 (ave.)
0.19
0.24
Saudi Arabia
Uruguay
Chile
Malaysia
Trinidad and Tobago
Mauritius
Mexico
Venezuela
Turkey
Panama
0.28e
0.12
0.21
0.33
0.18f
0.24
0.19
0.22
0.20
0.23
0.21
0.13
0.25
0.39
0.16
0.29
0.23
0.17
0.21
0.25
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1

Table 7 continued
Country
NS/Ya
I/Yb
Thailand
Costa Rica
Iran, I.R. of
Colombia
Namibia
Tunisia
Paraguay
0.34f
0.21
0.26
0.18
0.15
0.17
0.12
0.41
0.27
0.27
0.21
0.21
0.27
0.23
Countries with GNP/cap. 2000-5000 (ave.)
0.21
0.24
El Salvador
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
Jordan
Guatemala
Morocco
Philippines
Sri Lanka
Zimbabwe
Honduras
Pakistan
Zambia
Kenya
Burkina Faso
Malawi
0.01
0.13
0.16
0.01
0.07g
0.18
0.17
0.14
0.14f
0.17
0.16
0.10
0.13
0.07
0.01
0.17
0.23
0.20
0.32
0.15
0.22
0.23
0.25
0.21
0.30
0.19
0.24
0.20
0.24
0.18
Countries with GNP/cap. < 2000 (ave.)
0.11
0.22
All countries (average)
0.19
0.22
OECDC
aNS/Y: gross national saving/gross domestic product, averaged over 1990-1997. For OECD countries,
data on NS and Y are from the OECD database. For non-OECD countries, NS was constructed, from
International Financial Statistics (IMF), as follows: NS = GNP - private consumption - government
consumption. Our measure of NS for non-OECD countries does not exactly match the theoretical
definition. The main difference is that it does not take account of the balance-of-payments component
"net current transfers from abroad." Most of the countries that report data to the IMF and are not in the
sample were excluded for one of four reasons: (1) IFS has data only for GDP and not GNP; (2) there are
no IFS data on inventory investment; (3) there is a significant statistical discrepancy either between GDP
and its components (more than 3%), or between GNP and the sum of GDP and net factor income/
payments from abroad (more than 2%); (4) population is under 1 million.
I/Y: investment/GDP, average over 1990-1997. Investment is the sum of gross fixed capital formation
and increase (decrease) in inventory stocks. Sources are as in note a.
CTheOECD sample of countries includes those that were members in 1995.
dGNP per capita measured in U.S. dollars, for 1997.
eNo data for 1996 and 1997.
fNo data for 1997.
gNo data for 1991.

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Comment
OLIVIERJEANNE
InternationalMonetaryFund
1. Introduction
One of the pleasures in reading this paper is that it has the flavor of a
conspiracy theory. It explains a set of apparently unconnected and unexplained phenomena in terms of a single cause, which, the authors argue,
is not as implausible as it sounds. And they succeed at least in instilling
doubts-this on the basis of careful theoretical reasoning and some empirical evidence. This is a thought-provoking paper, which I expect to be
influential and inspire a number of theoretical and empirical papers: it
raises a number of hypotheses that are both theoretically intriguing and
potentially testable.
The thesis in this paper is that the main puzzles in international
macroeconomics can be explained as the result of costs in the trade of
goods and services. The paper nicely weaves together empirical evi-
Comment 391
dence and theoretical arguments, some of which are explicitly modeled
with the pedagogic elegance that is one of the authors' trademarks.
Obstfeld and Rogoff (OR) start with the rather uncontroversial point that
trade costs can generate a significant degree of segmentation in the
goods market, before moving to the more provocative part of their thesis: the international segmentation of asset markets could result from the
same trade costs. In other words, it might be unnecessary to invoke the
many frictions specific to the asset markets that have been discussed in
the literature.1
I shall focus my comments on the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle, the
international-consumption-correlation puzzle, and the exchange-rate disconnect puzzle, since this is where OR are more innovative and provocative. It is rather uncontroversial in principle that trade costs can generate
a significant degree of international segmentation in the goods market,
especially if goods are sufficiently substitutable and if trade costs are
defined in a sufficiently broad way. OR go beyond this theoretical remark, and convincingly argue, on the basis of estimates for transportation costs and the elasticity of substitution between goods, that trade
costs can explain a large degree of international segmentation in trade.
An important challenge, for the scholars who will pursue this line of
reasoning, will be to refine the mapping between the various trade costs
(distinguishing, in particular, between those that are border-related and
those that are not) and the pattern of trade segmentation that we observe
in the real world.
2. ExplainingAssetMarketSegmentation
by TradeCosts
OR's discussion of the different channels by which frictions can spill
over from goods markets to asset markets is truly impressive in its theoretical breadth and originality of insight. I shall restrict the scope of my
comments to the two channels which OR have chosen to model explicitly. The first model is presented by OR in connection with the FeldsteinHorioka puzzle; it relies on an implicit wedge in the real-interest-rate
parity condition. The second model attempts to explain the home bias in
equity portfolios; it looks at the implication of nontraded goods for portfolio choice.
1. The home bias in equity portfolios has been attributedto informationalasymmetries
(Kangand Stulz, 1994;Portesand Rey, 1999),culturaland linguisticbarriers,and differences in national tax systems and regulations (Tesarand Werner, 1995). Kraay and
Ventura(1999)show that in a portfolioperspectivethe Feldstein-Horiokapuzzle can be
viewed as a directconsequenceof the home bias in asset portfolios.
392 *JEANNE
The link between nontraded goods and portfolio choice is the object of
a growing literature, which is difficult to review in a short space. Let me
simply note that this literature may seem a bit less optimistic, in its most
recent developments, than OR in this paper. In her recent review, Lewis
(1999) underlines several shortcomings of the approach; in particular,
she argues that a key prediction of OR's Section 4 model-that investors
hold a globally diversified portfolio of traded-good industries, but
not supnontraded-good industries are held entirely domestically-is
ported by casual empiricism. Pesenti and Van Wincoop (1996) apply a
model of optimal portfolio choice with nontraded goods to fourteen
OECD countries, and find that it can explain only a small fraction of the
home bias. The model presented here by OR differs from the previous
literature by assuming a trade cost which applies to all domestic output,
rather than drawing an arbitrary line between tradables and nontradables. It remains to be seen whether endogenizing the frontier between
traded and nontraded goods significantly improves the model's ability to
explain the home bias in equity portfolios.
I was more intrigued by the first channel, "an entirely new explanation, based on transaction costs for international trade in goods," (Section 3.1) and shall spend, accordingly, the rest of this section commenting on it.
PRICEWEDGES:
2.1 TRADECOSTSAND INTERTEMPORAL
A ONE-GOODMODEL
In their explanation of the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle OR present a model
of the consumption-saving choice in a small open economy with trade
costs. First, let me rephrase OR's main point in the context of a one-good
model (this is the limit of their two-good model where the two goods are
perfectly substitutable). The one-good model is less general but makes
the logic of OR's point more transparent.2 I keep the same notation as
OR except that the subscripts denoting the difference between home and
foreign goods are dropped. For convenience, the representative agent's
psychological discount rate is assumed to be equal to the world real
interest rate.
The good can be exported to or imported from a global perfectly competitive market, where its price, P*, is fixed in terms of the world currency unit. Because a fraction Tof the good "melts" in transit, the home
price of the good (where home means net of trade costs) is given by
2. The one-good model was presented in the first version of OR's paper, although not in
the same way as I am presenting it here.
Comment 393
P*
f=
Pt
if the country imports (Ct > Yt),
1-T
(1 - T)P*,
1 -T
= (1 - T)P*
if the trade balance is equal to zero (Ct = Y),

if the country exports (Ct < Y).
The home price of the good is a discontinuous function of domestic

consumption. It jumps down when the trade balance switches from a
deficit to a surplus.
The first-period and second-period budget constraints are respectively
given by P1(C, - Y,) = D and P2(Y2 - C2) = (1 + r*)D, where D is
borrowing from abroad in world currency units. The domestic
consumption-saving problem thus can be written
max
u(C1) + 3u(C2)
s.t.
C1 +
C2
Y2
=Y1 +
+
+
(1 r*)(Pl/P2)
(1 r*)(P1/P2)
The representative consumer's intertemporal budget constraint is depicted in Figure 1. The budget constraint exhibits a kink at the point
where the country consumes its endowment in each period, as it would
do under autarky. The kink results from the iceberg cost which is paid on
each way of the round trip when the country exports the good at one
period and imports it at the other. Trade costs generate a wedge between
the world real interest rate r* and the rate at which domestic agents can
substitute their consumption intertemporally, r = (1 + r*)(P/P2) - 1 (the
"domestic real interest rate," in OR's words).
At the optimum the representative consumer's iso-utility curve must
be tangent to the budget curve. If tangency is reached at the kink of the
budget curve, as in Figure 1, there is no international trade in equilibrium.3 This case arises if the difference between the period 1 and period
2 endowments, Y1and Y2,is not too large. For example, if u(c) = c'-P/(1 3. Note that in order to solve the model one has to assume that the representativeconsumer is aware of the kink in the country's budget constraint, i.e., takes as given the
world price of the good, P*, and not the home price, RP
394 - JEANNE
Figure 1
C2
Y2
slope-(+rC*)1-)-
Yl
Cl
p) and the psychological discount rate is equal to the world interest rate
[13(1+ r*) = 1], there is no trade provided that
(1 -
Y2
(1 )/P <-<
)-2/
(1)
The no-trade region can be pretty large for plausible values of the parameters. To illustrate, if utility is logarithmic and trade costs amount to
10% of trade volume (a very conservative estimate by OR's standards,
who use a figure of 25% in their calibration), there is no trade as long as
the difference between Y1and Y2does not exceed 20%.
It is interesting to note that these results do not hinge on particular
assumptions on the time structure. The two periods could be separated
by one month or one generation. If the model had more than two periods, or time were continuous, the no-trade region would still be characterized by a condition like (1). The model predicts that there is no international trade as long as domestic income does not deviate too much from
its average level.
Figure 2 illustrates, in continuous time, how the model can explain the
low international correlation of consumption (the Feldstein-Horioka
puzzle). The figure shows domestic consumption and the trade balance
Comment 395
Figure 2
Y,C
j~~~~
\/9
\.
No-trade
Region
//s~~~~~
~'
t\
Output,Y
-..-..-..-..-..-..
Consumption,C
TradeBalance, Y-C
for an arbitrary continuous time path of domestic output. As long as

domestic output remains in the no-trade region, the trade balance is
equal to zero and the fluctuations in consumption mirror those of output. By contrast, consumption is completely smoothed when output
takes extreme values outside the no-trade region. As a result, the correlation between domestic output and domestic consumption is equal to
1 in the no-trade region and equal to 0 outside. If output remains in the
no-trade region most of the time, the observed average correlation will
be close to 1. This might seem like a puzzle to the outside observer, who
would expect consumption to be smoothed all the time, given that the
capital market is perfectly integrated internationally (this is one way to
define the international-consumption-correlation puzzle).
Explaining the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle by the same logic requires an
explicit consideration of investment opportunities at home and abroad.
Assume for example that residents have access to domestic investment
opportunities with decreasing returns. If, in the two-period model, the
return on the marginal domestic investment remains between (1 - r)2
and (1 - T)-2times the return on investments abroad, then the represen-
396 *JEANNE
tative domestic agent invests all his savings at home, and domestic saving and investment behave in the same way as under autarky. Domestic
saving will be perfectly correlated with domestic investment, as in the
Feldstein-Horioka puzzle.
2.2 THEMULTI-GOODCASE
In order to explain the low correlation of international consumption (the
Feldstein-Horioka puzzle), OR need trade costs to generate a wedge
between the domestic real interest rate and the world real interest rate.
In other words, they need the instantaneous price wedge generated by
trade costs-which
they use to explain the home bias in trade-to be
augmented by an intertemporalwedge. As OR's two-good model shows,
this intertemporal wedge can arise under more complex goods structures than the one-good model I have just presented, although in that
case the analysis is more complicated.
Introducing a second good into the model allows us to focus on the
composition of the country's imports and exports. In OR's two-good
model the home and foreign goods are both exchanged in global competitive markets at given prices in terms of foreign currency units. While the
foreign good is always imported, the home good may be exported or
imported in equilibrium. Whether the home good is imported or exported, moreover, is crucial for the model's ability to produce a wedge
between the domestic real interest rate and the world interest rate.
As OR show, if the trade balance involves a round trip in the home
if this good is exported at one period and imported at the
good-i.e.,
other-there is a wedge between the domestic real interest rate and the
world interest rate.4 In this case the consumption-saving behavior of
domestic residents can be analyzed in the same terms as in the one-good
model, the home good playing the same role as the single good in the
one-good model. By contrast, if the domestic country exports the home
good in both periods, there is no wedge in the real-interest-rate parity
condition, and the intertemporal current account behaves in the same
way, qualitatively, as in the absence of trade costs.5 Although trade costs
distort the relative price of the home and foreign goods in each period,
they do not change the intertemporalrate of substitution of home consumption between period 1 and period 2.
This raises the question of the robustness of OR's explanation for the
Felstein-Horioka puzzle to changes in the underlying assumptions on
the goods structure. In particular, it would be interesting to explore how
easily the logic of OR's argument can be transposed to a framework
4. The round-trip case corresponds to segments I and V of the curve in OR's Figure 1.
5. This case corresponds to segment III of the curve in OR's Figure 1.
Comment*397
where international trade involves differentiated goods. The transposition is not trivial, because trade in differentiated goods cannot exhibit
the round trips which seem to play a role in OR's results. While a carproducing country may have a trade deficit or a trade surplus in cars at
any given period, it is impossible by constructionfor this country's trade
balance to exhibit a round trip in any of the differentiated goods, or
brands, that compose the composite good "car." France, say, always
exports Renaults and always imports Fords or Volkswagens.
Generalizing OR's model to differentiated goods would also enhance
its empirical relevance. It is well known that most of the trade between
industrial countries involves differentiated goods. This stylized fact has
been widely documented in the literature on international trade under
imperfect competition, for which it provided the founding motivation. It
would be important to understand how the logic of OR's argument
applies to this case, since it is precisely for developed economies that the
Felstein-Horioka puzzle and the international-consumption-correlation
puzzle are most puzzling (for less developed economies other factors,
such as country risk, can be invoked, as OR note).
2.3 A LOOKAT THEDATA
Although it remains to be seen whether OR's analysis is robust to monopolistic competition, their assumptions seem plausible for international trade in raw commodities, which are generally exchanged in very
competitive markets. Their model predicts that because of trade costs,
we should observe few round trips in raw commodities. Is this prediction borne out by the data? Table 1 provides evidence on the occurrence
of round trips for a sample of ten countries and five raw commodities.
The table is constructed using the United Nations annual trade data set
over the period 1988-1998. The + (-) sign indicates that the country has
been an exporter (importer) of the commodity over the whole period,
i.e., every single year from 1988 to 1998. The sign + indicates that at least
one round trip (change in the sign of the trade balance in the commodity) has been observed.
The results reported in Table 1 are consistent with the model's prediction. Of the 42 country-commodity pairs for which data are available,
almost 90% do not show any round trip. This finding could be interpreted as evidence in favor of OR's hypothesis that round trips are
discouraged by trade costs. However, it could also reflect the fact that
trade in primary commodities is driven by comparative advantage, not
by intertemporal consumption smoothing. In a world where comparative advantage is the driving force, we would observe very few round
trips even in the absence of trade costs.
398 *JEANNE
Table 1 ROUND TRIPSIN RAWCOMMODITIES
(1988-1998)
Country
Australia
France
Germany
Indonesia
Italy
Japan
New Zealand
Turkey
U.K.
U.S.
Wheat
+
+
+
NA
NA
+
+
+
Natural
rubber
Iron
ore
+
-
+
NA
-
NA
+
NA
-
Crude
petroleum
+
+
NA
-NA
+
Natural
gas
+
+
+
NA
Source:United Nations;annual data 1988-1998.The SITCcodes of the commoditiesare:041 (wheatincludingspelt-and meslin, unmiled); 231(naturalrubberand similarnaturalgums);281 (ironore and
concentrates);333 (petroleumoils and oils obtainedfrombituminousminerals,crude);343 (naturalgas,
whetheror not liquefied).The observationfor a given countrywas treatedas not availableif threeyears
or more of the correspondingannualdata were not availablein the UN data set. I initiallyconsidereda
sample of 17 countries,and then excluded the 6 countriesfor which data were not availablefor at least
threecommodities.
DisconnectPuzzle
3. TheExchange-Rate
OR present very stimulating developments on exchange-rate excess volatility and what they call the exchange-ratedisconnect. Their point can be
loosely summarized as follows: because of the combination of nominal
stickiness and pricing to market at the level of the domestic consumers,
the exchange rate matters very little for anything real in the domestic
economy (at least in the short run), so that it can wander around under
the impact of small shocks. OR's "disconnect" is between the exchangerate and goods markets.
OR's point is related to an old question in exchange-rate economics:
Should one view exchange rates primarily as asset prices or primarily as
the determinants of relative prices in goods markets? Of course they
are both to some extent, and one way to view the history of exchangeits early developments to the "new open macrorate theory-from
economics"-is as a long struggle to integrate both aspects of exchangerate determination in a coherent framework. The substance of the
question, however, was in the adverb primarily.To rephrase the question:
Is it practically more relevant to think of exchange rates as asset prices, or
as determinants of relative prices in the markets for goods-if, leaving
general equilibrium aside, one had to choose between the two views? I
interpret OR's "exchange-rate disconnect" as the idea that exchange
Comment 399
rates matter so little for relative prices that they can best be viewed as
asset prices-at least to a first approximation.
3.1 A MODEL
A model can help us to
costs and exchange-rate
the two-period one-good
log-linearized version of
equations:
mt - Pt = ct,
t = 1,2,
1
cl = --[il-(Pe2p
Y1= (oP1,
better understand the link between the trade

volatility. I consider a monetary extension of
model discussed in the previous section. The
the model is given by the following set (S) of
(LM)
P1) + c2, (IS)
2 = o,
cl + C2= Yl + Y2,
il = e - sl,
t = 1,2
Pt = St,
(PC)
(BC)
(IP)
(LOP)
The model is written assuming no trade costs (introduced later). The

domestic country issues its own currency, and nominal variables now
refer to prices in terms of the domestic currency. The first equation is an
interest-inelastic money demand equation of the type implied by a cashin-advance constraint. The second equation is the Euler equation for
consumption, sometimes called the "new Keynesian" IS curve. The following equations are Phillips curves where, viewed from period 1, the
nominal wage is sticky in period 1 but flexible in period 2. The fourth
equation is the country's intertemporal budget constraint (linearized under the assumption that Y1and Y2are very close and that the world real
interest rate, r*, is equal to zero). The fifth equation is the interest parity
condition (reflecting the perfect integration of the capital account). And
the last equations correspond to the law of one price at periods 1 and 2,
resulting from the assumption that there are no trade costs. The exogenous policy variables are the log deviations in domestic money supply,
ml and m, which are both assumed to be stochastic. For convenience I
assume that the values of ml and m2are revealed at period 1, so that there
is no uncertainty about future money supply or any other variable when
the first-period exchange rate is determined.6
Let us look at the following question: How does the variance of the
exchange rate in period 1, Var(sl), depend on the level of trade costs, Tr?
To simplify the analysis I compare two extreme cases: perfect trade inte6. This explains why the risk premiumcan be ignored in the interestparitycondition.
400 JEANNE
gration (r1 = 0) and complete disintegration (r1 = +oo). In both cases
trade costs are assumed to be zero in period 2 (I discuss below the case
where r2is non-zero).
First let us consider the case of perfect trade integration. Then the law
of one price applies at period 1, i.e.,
sl = Pi
(2)
It follows from interest parity and the Euler condition that expected
consumption is equal to current consumption (c2 = cI). Taking the expectation of the budget constraint then gives cl = yi/2, i.e., half of the change
in current disposable income is consumed in period 1, the other half
being saved for consumption in period 2. The money-demand and
Phillips-curve equations finally give an expression for the exchange rate:
Si =?
ml
1 + ar/2
(3)
If the nominal wage is flexible at period 1 (or = 0), the exchange rate is
proportional to the money supply. In the presence of nominal rigidity
the impact of money supply on the exchange rate is damped by the
accommodating response of output.
Let us now consider the case where the international exchange of
good is prevented in period 1 by infinite trade costs (r1 = +oo). Then the
law of one price no longer holds at period 1 and domestic consumption
is equal to domestic output in both periods: cl = y, and c = y' = 0.
Taking the expectation of money demand at period 2 gives s2 = m2, so
that the nominal exchange rate at period 1 must satisfy
1
m2
(4)
ii.
Simple manipulations of the remaining equations then give the following reduced-form expression for the exchange rate:
s1
1 + po-
m,.
(5)
Comparing equations (2) and (4) brings out the implication of trade
costs for the determination of the exchange rate in this model. In the
absence of trade costs the exchange rate is determined in the goods
market: Equation (2) is an arbitrage condition between the domestic and
Comment 401
the foreign price of the good. By contrast, in the presence of (high
enough) trade costs, the exchange rate is determined in the asset market. Equation (4) is an arbitrage condition between domestic currency
and foreign currency bonds. In this simple setup, infinite trade costs
produce a complete exchange-rate disconnect at period 1 (in the sense
that the exchange rate has no direct connection with domestic output or
the domestic price level), and as a result, the equation for the exchange
rate becomes a pure asset-pricing equation.7
3.2 CAN THEEXCHANGE-RATE
DISCONNECTEXPLAIN
EXCESSIVEEXCHANGE-RATE VOLATILITY?
Does the exchange rate become more volatile as a result of trade costs?
Comparing equation (3) and equation (5) shows that the answer is yes if,
and only if, (1 + po-)/(l + r-)> 1/(1 + o-/2), i.e.,
p>
1
+
(6)
High trade costs increase exchange-rate volatility if the intertemporal

substitutability of consumption, l/p, is low enough. This is because a
lower intertemporal substitutability of consumption makes the interest
rate-and so the exchange rate, when it is determined as an asset
price-more volatile.
There is another sense in which trade costs can generate an exchangerate disconnect in this model. If international trade involves a cost not
only at period 1 but also at period 2 (T2t 0), then the nominal exchange may
become indeterminatein both periods over some range of parameter values. This point is extremely easy to see in the extreme case where trade
costs are infinite in both periods. Then the law of one price is removed
from the set of equations (S) and there is nothing to pin down the exchange rate. Indeterminacy can be a significant cause of volatility if the
exchange rate fluctuates widely in the range of indeterminacy, under the
influence of market sentiments and other nonfundamental factors.8
7. The asset marketis in equilibrium,and the.interestparity conditionholds, irrespective
of trade costs. Under the exchange-ratedisconnect, however, the interest paritycondition endogenizes the exchange rate after the nominal interest rate has been solved for
using the other equations. Under perfect trade integrationit endogenizes the nominal
interestrate afterthe exchange rate.
8. The intuitionbehind the exchange-rateindeterminacycan be conveyed by the following
civilizationwith
parable.Assume that humans come into contactwith an extraterrestrial
which telecommunicationsare easy, but the exchange of goods is ruled out forever
because of the enormous distancebetween them and us. Assume that in a misconceived
attemptto extend the reachof liberalcapitalismto outer space, an electronicmarketfor
the exchange of extraterrestrialand terrestrialcurrenciesand nominal bonds is estab-
402 JEANNE
The notion that exchange rates can be indeterminate, and that this
indeterminacy could generate excess volatility, is not new.9 From a theoretical point of view, moreover, indeterminacy is a rather brittle property
of this model. It hinges on a complete and permanent absence of international trade. The certainty that countries will exchange at least one good,
even in the distant future and in very small quantities, suffices to pin
down the exchange rate-making indeterminacy an unconvincing explanation for excess exchange-rate volatility in a world where countries
routinely trade with each other. Still the model may have some pedagogical value, if only to make the point that although their short-run dynamics may obey the rules of asset pricing, exchange rates are ultimately
pinned down by international trade in goods.
Another question is the extent to which the exchange-rate disconnect
makes the high volatility of exchange rates observed in the data less
puzzling. This is not entirely clear to me. The only substantial implication of the exchange-rate disconnect for exchange-rate volatility, if I
understand OR correctly, is that the volatility of exchange rates should
be thought of in the same way as the price volatility of other assets.10
The asset perspective, however, is precisely the one adopted by most of
the empirical literature on the excess volatility of exchange rates.ll The
exchange-rate disconnect, then, just leaves us with the more general
question: why are asset prices so volatile? Answering this question is
likely to require departures from key assumptions (such as common
knowledge or rational expectations) on which most exchange-rate models, including those in this paper, are based.
REFERENCES
Arifovic,J. (1996).The behavior of the exchange rate in the genetic algorithmand
experimental economies. Journalof Political Economy104:510-541.
Bartolini,L., and L. Giorgianni.(1999).Excessvolatility and the asset-pricingexchange ratemodel with unobservablefundamentals.IMF.WorkingPaper99/71.

lished. Then nominal exchange ratesbetween terrestrialand extraterrestrialcurrencies
can take completely arbitraryvalues when the new market is opened, since there is
nothing in this universe to anchortheir long-runvalues.
9. In a classical paper, Karekenand Wallace(1981)presented a model where exchangerate indeterminacyresulted from currencysubstitution.The implicationsfor exchangerate volatility were explored in several papers, including King, Wallace, and Weber
(1992)and Arifovic(1996).
10. This is indeed what they argue in their Foundations:"In trying to understand the
difficultiesin empiricallymodeling exchange rates, it is probablywrong to look for a
special explanation of exchange rate volatility. Instead, one should seek a unifying
explanation for the volatility that all major asset prices display, including those of
stocks and bonds as well as currencies."(Obstfeldand Rogoff, 1996,p. 626)
11. See Bartoliniand Giorgianni(1999)and the referencestherein.
Comment 403
Kang, J.-K., and R. M. Stulz. (1994). Why is there a home bias? An analysis of
46:3foreign portfolio equity ownership in Japan.Journalof FinancialEconomics
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Kareken, J. H., and N. Wallace. (1981). On the indeterminacyof equilibrium
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Kraay,A., and J. Ventura.(1999).Currentaccounts in debtor and creditorcountries. Departmentof Economics, MIT.Mimeo.
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Comment'
CHARLESENGEL
Universityof WisconsinandNBER
1. Introduction
Obstfeld and Rogoff have once again written an important paper that
undoubtedly will be highly influential in developing our understanding
of many of the major puzzles in international macroeconomics. They
highlight the fact that goods markets for consumers appear to be very far
from being perfectly integrated, and show how this imperfection can
help provide a unified understanding of the puzzles that have eluded
satisfactory explanation. These goods-market imperfections are a plausible direction to look toward because the empirical evidence suggests
they are significant in magnitude. And Obstfeld and Rogoff (referred to
as OR hereinafter) provide us with models that make sense at an intuitive level.
My comments primarily focus on three issues:
(a)
How do we reconcile the numerical examples of OR, which show

quantitatively plausible resolutions to the major puzzles arising
1. I thank Andy Atkeson, Mick Devereux, and FabrizioPerrifor helpful input on these
comments.
404 ENGEL
from costs of trade, with previous studies that have found that
trade costs do not get us very far?
the solution proposed by OR solve the puzzles at the expense
Does
(b)
of introducing new puzzles? That is, does their solution have counterfactual implications for other economic relationships? (The prime
example of what I have in mind here is what OR call the "BackusSmith puzzle.")
Some
of the problems connected with points (a) and (b) can be recti(c)
fied by moving away from the assumption of complete asset markets. But, then, how do we assess how much of the solution to the
puzzle is coming from trade costs vs. capital-market imperfections?
In reviewing some of the existing literature, it appears to me that trade
frictions alone do not explain the puzzles. While they move things in the
right direction, quantitatively goods frictions are insufficient. OR provide us with extraordinary intuition for why goods markets move things
in the right direction, but we need more study to be able to reconcile
their compelling but simplified examples with the results that emerge
from simulation of more fully specified dynamic models. This very much
reminds me of the literature on one puzzle that OR do not try to
resolve-the forward-premium puzzle. There, the easy explanation that
was proposed is that a foreign-exchange risk premium can lead to biased
forecasts of the forward premium. But when researchers tried to embed
risk premiums into calibrated equilibrium models and assess the size of
that effect, they found that the risk premium was far too small to explain
the magnitude of the deviations from uncovered interest parity. The
parallel is that the literature so far has not found that goods-market
imperfections alone can quantitatively explain the OR puzzles.
There is another parallel with the literature on the forward-premium
puzzle. When researchers finally were able to construct models that got
close to matching the magnitude and sign of the deviation from uncovered interest parity, they found that their models had a very unpleasant implication about the moments of another variable. In that case, the
problem was that the models implied nominal-interest-rate volatility
that was much greater than what is found in the data. The parallel here
is that the models that OR propose imply a high correlation of real
exchange rates with relative consumption levels across countries. OR
call this the "Backus-Smith" problem. They appear to dismiss this issue,
but in doing so leave me puzzled as to how we can reconcile the implications of their approach with the data.
My comments will focus on puzzles 2-4 of OR (which I call the core
puzzles): the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle, the home-bias-in-equity-port-
Comment 405
folios puzzle, and the international-consumption-correlations puzzle.
These three puzzles are linked in that they can best be understood as
pointing toward a surprising lack of risk sharing internationally. I comment only briefly on the other three puzzles.
To reiterate, I do think that costs of trade are fundamental in understanding these puzzles. Capital-market imperfections alone are not the
answer. OR provide new insight into how trade costs can help resolve
the puzzles, and should help to focus future research endeavors in this
promising direction.
2. TheCorePuzzles
To my tastes, the clearest way to demonstrate the claim that trade costs
alone can explain the core puzzles would be to use the model of complete asset markets and no trade frictions as the benchmark, and show
how far trade costs get us. For example, the home-bias-in-portfolios
puzzle is no puzzle at all if the null model is one in which there are
restrictions on asset trade or missing asset markets.
Let me briefly review the three core puzzles to help clarify. We find
very low correlations of consumption internationally. That is puzzling
because it seems to imply that there is very little sharing of idiosyncratic
shocks to income. To me (and to OR) the puzzle is not that there is an
absence of complete risk sharing. The puzzle is that there appears to be
so little risk sharing-much less than we would expect given the wide
array of assets that allow us to hedge risk. But how can we measure
the ability of trade costs to explain the low correlation of consumption
levels? The natural way to me (and apparently to OR) is to assess the
effects of introducing trade costs into a model with complete asset markets. We know that the free-trade, complete-markets model implies perfect correlation-so how far does that correlation fall when there are
plausible trade costs?
Home bias in portfolios is puzzling at an intuitive level. Investors
could more effectively hedge risk by balancing their portfolios among
assets from countries around the globe. Diversification is the fundamental principle of risk management. Again, however, it is helpful to have a
benchmark to assess the effects of trade costs. In general, full diversification of equity holdings does not achieve complete risk sharing, but OR
quite naturally focus on special models where that does occur. This
special case is appealing because it gives us a simple benchmark to
compare the effects of market imperfections against. Furthermore, as
OR show in this paper (and in their 1996 textbook), "for realistic parameters, trade in equities alone can come quite close to attaining the
406 ENGEL
complete-markets consumption allocation, so that the home bias evident
under complete markets is a good guide to the home bias in an equitiesonly model."
The Feldstein-Horioka paradox has been a hard one to pin down.
Why is the finding of low correlation of saving and investment a puzzle?
OR's (1996) textbook has, for my tastes, the clearest explanation of the
puzzle. In a Walrasian model with no trade barriers and complete asset
markets, the amount of investment in a country's capital stock should be
independent of the parameters that determine the country's consumption level. The simplest way to see this is to think of the special cases in
which a diversified portfolio of equities mimics complete markets. In
that case, the firm's decision to add to capital must be independent of
the consumption choices of the individuals who live in the country
where the firm produces. The firm is owned globally, so why would the
consumption or saving decisions of the residents of the country where
the firm is located have any special influence on its investment decision?
So, again, a natural benchmark to compare the effects of trade costs
alone is the free-trade, complete-markets Walrasian model.
3. TheLiterature
There are two reasons why I emphasize that the complete-asset-markets
model is a natural benchmark. First, there actually exists a literature that
looks into trade costs as an explanation for these puzzles. Using complete markets as the benchmark, introducing trade costs alone does not
appear to get us very far in resolving the puzzles. The second reason I
emphasize it is that while OR naturally gravitate toward the completemarkets model as a benchmark, in several instances they subsequently
inveigh against that model on the grounds essentially that in the real
world markets are not complete. True, but the complete-markets model
is a useful benchmark. I address the literature in this section. In Section
5, I return to the benchmark issue.
The careful reader might have noticed footnote 2 in OR. It makes
reference to Backus, Kehoe, and Kydland (1992), which is the piece that
brought the consumption correlation puzzle to the attention of the profession. That paper actually devotes an entire section to whether the
introduction of trade costs of precisely the type OR propose can explain
the consumption correlation puzzle. Their model is a fairly detailed
Walrasian, complete-markets model. They can assess directly the effect
of trade costs on consumption correlations. And they find that the introduction of trade costs into their model actually makes the consumption
Comment 407
correlation puzzle worse, not better. Further investigation by the same
authors in a subsequent study using alternative specifications of trading
costs (Backus, Kydland, and Kehoe 1995) confirms that the consumption
correlation puzzle is not solved by trading costs.
In fact, however, the Feldstein-Horioka problem is partly explained
by Backus, Kydland, and Kehoe when trading costs are introduced.
And, as OR note in footnote 25, one can interpret some of their results as
supporting the contention that moderate transportation costs help resolve the home-bias-in-equities puzzle. However, this illustrates where
we need to go with the observations of OR. Does the solution to one
puzzle make things worse for the others? When Backus, Kydland, and
Kehoe build a benchmark complete-markets free-trade Walrasian model,
they find that introducing trade costs helps in some dimensions but not
others. And, as I shall discuss in the next section, there are some other
dimensions along which the trade costs make things much worse.
I agree with OR that the dichotomy in many papers between traded
goods and nontraded goods is not a useful one. As they say, we can
probably think of all consumer goods as having a nontradable component. The problems they discuss in Sections 6.2-6.5 ought to be at the
core of what we do research on in international macroeconomics. But,
still, one wonders whether the literature in which nontraded goods are
introduced as an explanation for these puzzles might be instructive as to
how far trade costs will get us. By and large, the nontraded-goods models have not been particularly useful in resolving these puzzles. OR do
provide a helpful description of the shortcomings of the nontradedgoods model with the portfolio diversification paradox, and show how
trade costs might get us further. But what about the other core puzzles?
And what about the Backus-Smith paradox?
4. OtherVariables
As OR note in equation (15), the complete-markets models they introduce imply perfect correlation of the log of relative consumption levels
internationally with real exchange rates. Backus and Smith (1993) were
the first to derive this implication in a model with trade imperfections.
(Theirs was a model with nontraded goods.) But the condition arises in a
wide variety of contexts in which the law of one price fails.
The problem is that in the data there is virtually no correlation between
relative consumption levels and real exchange rates. Backus and Smith
document this in a fairly simple way for G7 countries. But Kollmann
(1995) and Ravn (2000) thoroughly demolish the notion that these two
408 ENGEL
variables are connected. Kollman shows that, generally for advanced
countries, real exchange rates and relative consumption levels are not
cointegrated and that there is no discernible short-run relationship.
Of course, models sometimes have ancillary implications that are not
supported by the data but are not critical to the issue of interest. But
here, the implication is central to the resolution of the puzzles. In the OR
models of this paper, trade costs lead to deviations from the law of one
price, and deviations from the law of one price are the sole reason for the
failure of purchasing-power parity. The changes in the real exchange rate
that are generated are, in turn, what break the link between consumption levels across countries. That is, it is precisely the nonconstancy of
real exchange rates in their models that explains why there does not
appear to be a great deal of risk sharing.
My sense is that it is knowledge of the empirical findings of Backus
and Smith (1993) and Kollmann (1995) that has convinced researchers
that trade costs per se, or more generally models with law-of-one-price
deviations, are not the sole solution to these riddles. Perhaps researchers
should not have been scared away from this avenue, but OR do little to
help us out on this problem. They say that "Trade costs would play
essentially the same role in a world with, say, trade in debt and equities
but not a complete set of Arrow-Debreu securities." That may be true,
but it needs to be demonstrated. Can trade costs play a quantitatively
significant role in resolving the puzzles in such a model? At this stage,
this seems not much more than a conjecture. The models that are presented in this paper all have the implication that relative consumption
levels are perfectly correlated with real exchange rates. OR provide us
with no evidence about models in which this link is broken.
It is also a bit disconcerting that OR focus exclusively on the implications of their models for the puzzles that the model is meant to address,
and not on other implications of the model. The type of discipline that we
rightly demand from the purveyors of general equilibrium Walrasian models (that is, the RBCers) is that they show us that the models can explain
moments of some variables without generating unreasonable correlations
among other variables. For example, would the OR models with trade
costs imply negative correlation of inputs, such as arise in many of the
RBC models (with and without trade frictions or nontraded goods)?
5. TheBenchmark
OR seem to shrug off the Backus-Smith puzzle: "We do not take this as
damning, since for us the complete-markets assumption was only a
useful device for calibration, and not a conviction." Of course that is true
Comment 409
for me too. But, where are we left? Apparently we need to concede that
there is some deviation from complete markets to be able to accommodate the Backus-Smith problem. How far from completeness do they
have to be? At what point have we stepped over the line and made
capital-market imperfections part of the solution to the problem? In
short, how can OR say that we can solve these riddles "without appealing to capital-market imperfections"?
6. TheOtherPuzzles
Let me briefly comment on some of the other issues raised by OR. First, I
am not convinced that allowing for high elasticities of substitution goes
that far in solving the home-bias-in-trade puzzle. There are small frictions in within-country trade as well, and one would suspect that goods
produced within a country's borders are even closer substitutes than
internationally traded goods. Yet, the small intranational trading costs
do not seem to impose much of a barrier to intranational trade. Indeed,
the revised version of Evans (2000) concludes that the story in which
"high border effects arise almost entirely from high elasticities of substitution provides at best a partial explanation" of the home bias in trade.
The misleading thing about the OR examples in this regard is that
there are no intranational frictions in trade. So they tell us that 0.25 is a
modest value for proportional international trade costs, but implicitly
assume that 0 is a modest value of intranational trade costs. It is easy to
set up a model parallel to the one described in equations (1)-(6) of OR,
but with two regions within each of two countries. Consider their calibration, allowing the elasticity of substitution intranationally and internationally to be equal to 6, but introduce within-country trade costs of 0.10.
Then the ratio of intranational trade to international trade in the model
falls to 2.5. If, in addition, one allows the intranational elasticity of substitution to be greater than the international elasticity (equal to 12 instead
of 6), the trade-costs model goes only a small way toward explaining the
home trade bias. The ratio of international to within-country trade explained by the model is merely 1.3.
I found OR's discussion of the final two puzzles engaging and stimulating. Let me make just two comments. First, I think even in trying to
explain exchange-rate volatility it might turn out that we need more than
just goods-market imperfections. Here is why I make this conjecture.
Betts and Devereux (1996) consider exchange-rate volatility in which
consumer goods markets are completely segmented and the law of one
price fails. In their static model, indeed they find exchange-rate volatility
is much larger (6 times larger) than a parallel model in which the law of
410 ENGEL
one price and PPP hold. But when they move to a dynamic model with
capital mobility (Betts and Devereux, 2000), the volatility effect is much
smaller. The exchange-rate variance is only 1.7 times larger in the
segmented-markets model than in the model with integrated goods market. OR's intuition is that the goods-market frictions modify the dampening effect that capital markets have on exchange-rate fluctuations. But,
in a dynamic setting, Betts and Devereux's results suggest that the modification may not be large.
The second comment is that I think it is a mistake to link the exchangerate disconnect puzzle with exchange-rate volatility. One way of putting
it is that the exchange-rate disconnect puzzle is about why exchange
rates are not correlated with fundamentals. It is a puzzle about correlations, not variances. In other words, I believe the case that OR are trying
to make is that unobserved shocks might have a large effect on exchange
rates if exchange rates are highly volatile. But observed shocks in the
money supply and other fundamentals also should have large effects. It
is not immediately clear that high volatility in the exchange rate implies a
weak link between the exchange rate and fundamentals (which is what
the exchange-rate disconnect puzzle is all about).
7. ConcludingComments
I think there may be a close link between the type of goods-market frictions OR describe and possible failures in the capital markets. Because the
discipline imposed by goods markets on the equilibrium exchange rate is
so weak, there may be more room (particularly in the short run) for noise
in exchange rates. That is, "chartists" as in Frankel and Froot (1990), or
noise traders as in Jeanne and Rose (1999), or order flow from foreignexchange traders as in Evans and Lyons (1999), might influence the exchange rate in the short run because misalignments in the exchange rate
do not provoke a large immediate response from the real side of the
economy. OR may be hinting at this in their Section 6.7 (or they may not
be). I think this is a promising avenue to explore to help understand
exchange-rate volatility and the disconnect between exchange rates and
fundamentals. But it will require formal modeling and testing.
While it may seem that I am very skeptical of the ideas OR have
presented here, I am not. My hunch is that their view and mine on these
issues are very close (at least compared to the huge lack of consensus in
international macroeconomics). I am more cautious than OR about the
degree to which trade costs alone have solved the puzzles. But this
difference in tone probably mostly reflects the differing roles of paper
writers and paper discussants.
Discussion?411
One final thought: it may be that over the next 50 years or so, international goods markets will become much more integrated and efficient
through cyberspace, making the types of goods-market frictions that OR
discuss less important over time. By the time we have built the models
that explain the puzzles, the models and the puzzles may be obsolete.
REFERENCES
Backus,D. K., P.J. Kehoe, and E E. Kydland. (1992).Internationalrealbusiness
cycles. Journalof PoliticalEconomy101:745-775.
. (1995). Internationalbusiness cycles: Theory and
, and
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evidence. In Frontiersof BusinessCycleResearch,T. E Cooley, (ed.). Princeton,
NJ:PrincetonUniversity Press.
, and G. Smith. (1993).Consumption and real exchange rates in dynamic
Economics
exchange economies with nontraded goods. Journalof International
35:297-316.
Betts, C., and M. B. Devereux. (1996).The exchange rate in a model of pricingto
EconomicReview40:1007-1021.
market. European
. (2000). Exchange rate dynamics in a model of pricing-to, and
market.Journalof International
Economics
50:215-244.
Evans, C. (2000). The economic significance of national border effects. Federal
Reserve Bankof New York.WorkingPaper.
Evans, M. D. D., and R. K. Lyons. (1999).Orderflow and exchange rate dynamics. Cambridge,MA: National Bureauof EconomicResearch. NBERWorking
Paper7317.
Frankel,J. A., and K. A. Froot. (1990). Chartists,fundamentalists, and the demand for dollars. In PrivateBehaviourand Government
Policyin Interdependent
Economies,A. S. Courakis and M. P. Taylor (eds.). Oxford University Press.
Jeanne, 0., and A. K. Rose. (1999). Noise trading and exchange rate regimes.
Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER Working
Paper7104.
Kollman,R. (1995).Consumption, real exchange rates and the structureof international asset markets. Journalof International
Moneyand Finance14:191-211.
Macroeconomics.
Obstfeld, M., and K. Rogoff. (1996).Foundationsof International
Cambridge,MA: The MITPress.
Ravn, M. 0. (2000). Consumption dynamics and real exchange rates. London
Business School. WorkingPaper.
Discussion
Responding to the discussants, Ken Rogoff noted that they had chosen
simple examples to illustrate their main points but that the results
would survive generalization. For example, it would not be difficult to
add nominal rigidities or a sharp distinction between traded and nontraded goods to most of the examples-although,
he noted, to get the
412 *DISCUSSION
same results as with moderate trade costs, it might be necessary to
assume that a very large fraction of goods are nontraded.
Michael Klein observed that trading costs, broadly construed, seem to
be declining over time, which should imply that some of the puzzles are
becoming less pronounced. Maury Obstfeld agreed and cited results in
the literature to the effect that home biases in asset holdings and consumption have become smaller recently. Valerie Ramey suggested that
immigration patterns and policies may affect trading costs, as immigrants are often effective middlemen for trade between their country of
origin and their current residence. Richard Portes agreed with discussant
Charles Engel that a full explanation of asset-market puzzles would
require asset-market as well as goods-market imperfections, such as
asymmetric information.
Alberto Alesina asked how broadly trade costs should be defined. For
example, do they include costs arising from different currencies, languages, and legal systems? Obstfeld said that they were comfortable
with a quite broad interpretation of trade costs. Alesina also noted that
the number of countries in the world is rising, which is a negative development if cross-border costs are high. Obstfeld replied that Alesina's
own work suggests that countries are proliferating in part because national independence confers greater flexibility in establishing trading
and other economic relationships; so perhaps this is not a concern.
Allan Drazen objected to the use of iceberg costs on the grounds that
the most important effects empirically are not distance effects but border
effects. Further, many trading costs are not exogenous but are endogenously chosen, e.g., trade barriers. He suggested that European economic integration provides an excellent test case to study the effects of
falling trade costs. Obstfeld agreed that border-related trade costs are
quite important; the decision to use iceberg costs was based primarily on
considerations of tractability.
John Leahy expressed the concern that the effects identified in this
paper might turn out to be quantitatively small in a realistically calibrated model. The authors agreed that more work needed to be done to
flesh out their story but noted that their model differs in important ways
from those previously studied in the literature.

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This PDF is a selection from an out-of-print volume from the National

Bureau of Economic Research

Volume Title: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2000, Volume 15

Chapter Title: The Six Major Puzzles in International Macroeconomics:

340 *OBSTFELD& ROGOFF

2. ThePuzzleof HomeBiasin Trade(Puzzle1)

342 *OBSTFELD& ROGOFF

where CHis home consumption of the home-produced good and CF is

Thus, if p - PF/PH, and p*

(We will maintain the assumption of competitive markets through the

344 *OBSTFELD& ROGOFF

Combining (4) and (5) implies

For illustrative purposes, consider the easy symmetric case in which

and equation (6) reduces

This equation shows that the ratio of home (foreign) expenditure on

with respect to trade costs is 7(0 - 1)/(1 - r) = 1.67.

346 *OBSTFELD& ROGOFF

aSource:Hummels (1999a),compiled from U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Importsof Merchandise.

348 *OBSTFELD& ROGOFF

and the representativeforeign agent's utility function with

Though international-financepuzzles are our main focus, we note that

350 * OBSTFELD & ROGOFF

Countries with GNP/cap. > 1000

Countries with GNP/cap. > 2000

aOLS regressions. Standard errors in parentheses.

The Feldstein-Horioka puzzle is durable because the core regression

352 *OBSTFELD& ROGOFF

Therefore, given a total real consumption level C in any period, the

13. Dumas (1992)likewise shows how internationalreal interest-ratedifferentialscan arise

r*)D = PH,2CH,2+ PF,2CF,2= P2C2.

or, in terms of the domestic real interest rate 1 + r = (1 + r*)PI/P2, as

354 * OBSTFELD & ROGOFF

period 1 it is exported, we have

in segment I. If the country contemplates being a big lender, it will face

+ =r (1 + r*) {[PH/(1 - T)]1-o + P1-J}1/(1-)

356 *OBSTFELD& ROGOFF

358 *OBSTFELD& ROGOFF

Table3 REALINTERESTRATESAND THECURRENTACCOUNT,

The dependentvariableis the annualizedthree-monthnominalinterestrateless lagged annualinflation

4. ThePuzzleof HomeBiasin EquityPortfolios(Puzzle3)

360 *OBSTFELD& ROGOFF

From Tesar and Werner (1998)

Potential explanations range from nontraded factors such as human

The Six Major Puzzles in InternationalMacroeconomics? 361

preferences (across the two types of good), investors hold a globally

We now add uncertainty to the two-country general equilibrium version

A home or foreign individual chooses state-contingent consumptions

362 *OBSTFELD& ROGOFF

Above, C is the index of total real consumption [per equation (1)], 0 is

for every state of nature, or

Together these conditions imply the ex post consumption efficiency

The model is closed by the output-market clearing conditions:

The Six Major Puzzles in InternationalMacroeconomics? 363

364 - OBSTFELD& ROGOFF

how insensitive the portfolio shares are even to large changes in p.

366 *OBSTFELD& ROGOFF

368 - OBSTFELD& ROGOFF

regardless of relative shocks to home and foreign outputs. (See Obstfeld

This generalizes equation (14) in that P = P* absent international trade