This paper contains essays on sterilized intervention, on covered interest rate parity, and on chartist analysis in financial markets. Each essay contains a definition, brief survey of the empirical evidence and overall assessment of each topic.

Each of the three essays composing this dissertation investigates important economic and econometric issues in international finance and macroeconomics. The first essay, “Market Structure and the Persistence of Sectoral Deviations from Purchasing Power Parity,” examines the relationship between market structure and the persistence of the dollar-based sectoral real exchange rates for fourteen OECD countries. The empirical results based on disaggregated data suggest that differences in market structure significantly determine the rates at which deviations from sectoral purchasing power parity decay. Based on the findings, I argue that an imperfectly competitive market structure is an important source of the well-documented persistence in real exchange rates.