The purpose of the study is to empirically determine the relevance of PPP theory under the traditional arbitrage and the efficient markets (EPPP) frameworks during the recent floating period of the 1980s. Monthly data was collected for fifteen industrial nations from January 1980 to December 1986. The models tested included the short-run PPP, the long-run PPP, the EPPP, the EPPP with deviations from expectations, the forward rates as unbiased estimators of future spot rates, the EPPP and the forward rates, and the EPPP with forward rates and lagged values. A generalized regression method called Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) was employed to test the models. The results support the efficient markets approach to PPP but fail to support the traditional PPP in both the short term and the long term. Moreover, the forward rates are poor and biased predictors of the future spot rates. The random walk hypothesis is generally supported.

Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story.

Photograph of a streetscape in Vienna, Austria. In the foreground, numerous shop signs and blue cafe umbrellas are visible; orange umbrellas are visible in the middle ground; more buildings and a sculpture in scaffolding are visible in the background.

Interview with Mike Jacobs, a Holocaust survivor from Konin, Poland. Jacobs discusses his family background and growing up in Konin's Jewish community, the growth of antisemitism, attending an integrated school, the German invasion and occupation, moving to the ghetto and life inside, collaborators and Jewish police, hostages, moving to a smaller ghetto, losing his family to Treblinka, working with Polish partisans, escaping the ghetto and working from Ostrowiec concentration camp, engaging in sabotage, life in the camp, transfer to Birkenau, the gas chambers, the attempted Auschwitz-Birkenau uprising, survival there, being evacuated to Vienna, labor in an aircraft factory, liberation, and life afterwards.