Heteroskedasticity biases tests for contagion based on correlation coefficients. When contagion is defined as a significant increase in market comovement after a shock to one country, previous work suggests contagion occurred during recent crises. This paper shows that correlation coefficients are conditional on market volatility. Under certain assumptions, it is possible to adjust for this bias. Using this adjustment, there was virtually no increase in unconditional correlation coefficients~i.e., no contagion! during the 1997 Asian crisis, 1994 Mexican devaluation, and 1987 U.S. market crash. There is a high level of market comovement in all periods, however, which we call interdependence.

Thanks to Rudiger Dornbusch, Andrew Rose, Jaume Ventura, and seminar participants at MIT, Dartmouth, and NYU for helpful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are our own.. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

This paper develops a method for solving the identification problem that arises in simultaneous-equation models. It is based on the heteroskedasticity of the structural shocks. For simplicity, I consider heteroskedasticity that can be described as a two-regime process and show that the system is just identified. I discuss identification under general conditions, such as more than two regimes, when common unobservable shocks exist, and situations in which the nature of the heteroskedasticity is misspecified. Finally, I use this methodology to measure the contemporaneous relationship between the returns on Argentinean, Brazilian, and Mexican sovereign bonds-a case in which standard identification methodologies do not apply. © 2003 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the open economy macro literature with nominal rigidities, the currency in which goods are priced has important implications for optimal monetary and exchange rate policy and for exchange rate pass-through. We show, using novel data on currency and prices for U.S. imports, that even conditional on a price change, there is a large difference in the pass-through of the average good priced in dollars (25%) versus non-dollars (95%). We document this to be the case across countries and within disaggregated sectors. This finding contradicts the assumption in an important class of models that the currency of pricing is exogenous. We present a model of endogenous currency choice in a dynamic price setting environment and show that the predictions of the model are strongly supported by the data. * We wish to thank the international price program of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for access to unpublished micro data.We owe a huge debt of gratitude to our project coordinator Rozi Ulics for her invaluable help on this project.

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Estimating the response of asset prices to changes in monetary policy is complicated by the endogeneity of policy decisions and the fact that both interest rates and asset prices react to numerous other variables. This paper develops a new estimator that is based on the heteroskedasticity that exists in high frequency data. We show that the response of asset prices to changes in monetary policy can be identified based on the increase in the variance of policy shocks that occurs on days of FOMC meetings and of the Chairman's semi-annual monetary policy testimony to Congress. The identification approach employed requires a much weaker set of assumptions than needed under the "event-study" approach that is typically used in this context. The results indicate that an increase in short-term interest rates results in a decline in stock prices and in an upward shift in the yield curve that becomes smaller at longer maturities.

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for useful comments. We also thank Oleg Itskhoki and Tim Schwuchow for excellent research assistance. ABSTRACTThe stickiness and currency of pricing of traded goods play a central role in international macroeconomics, however empirical evidence on these features is seriously limited. To address this we use microdata on U.S. import and export prices at-the-dock for the period 1994-2005, and present four main results: First, the median price duration in the currency of pricing is 10.6 (12.8) months for imports (exports). Second, 90% (97%) of imports (exports) are priced in dollars. Consequently, contrary to standard modeling assumptions, for the U.S, there is producer currency pricing in exports and local currency pricing in imports. Third, import price rigidity has increased by 10 percentage points, with increasing rigidity in differentiated goods prices. Fourth, even conditioning on a price change, exchange rate pass-through into U.S. import prices is low, at 22%.