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This paper highlights a prominent yet neglected feature of North–South trade, namely that the Northern currency is used as the medium of exchange. It investigates how this feature may affect the way real and monetary shocks are transmitted from the North to the South through trade. It shows that technological progress in the North benefits its Southern trading partner. However, if Southern consumers need to hold Northern money to pay for imports, a monetary expansion in the North hurts the South. In particular, it increases the demand for Northern money in the South, which has to be met by a transfer of real resources from the South to the North. This has an adverse effect on the terms of trade for the South and on the trade balance for the North. This last result is supported by our empirical analysis which shows a positive correlation between US money supply and US bilateral trade deficits with Mexico and with India.

The Chinese government has been active in trying to cool the alleged bubbles in its housing markets, especially in urban areas. This paper argues that the high housing prices are partly caused by some real factors, including the policy of restricting land uses, in particular the maintenance of a minimum overall agricultural acreage. A simple model of three sectors (housing, agriculture, and others) is constructed to examine the effects of the artificial constraint. The role of increasing returns in the non-agricultural sectors in exacerbating the policy biases is also examined. The model is then calibrated to estimate the effects of land use control policy on housing prices in China.

This paper develops a general equilibrium monetary model to study China–US trade relations. The model captures two main features of China–US trade: China's fixed exchange rate regime and the use of the US dollar as the international medium of exchange. The main conclusions of this paper are threefold. First, an improvement in the productivity of China's tradable sector would benefit both China and the US. Second, a RMB appreciation would reduce consumption in the US and increase consumption in China, and would likely reduce China's trade surplus. It would also lead to a contraction in China's tradable sector and an expansion in US's tradable sector. Third, a monetary expansion in the US would hurt China because it would lead to a transfer of wealth from China to the US, a fall in China's relative wage rate and terms of trade, and an artificial expansion in China's tradable sector. A US monetary expansion would also increase China's trade surplus.