Fundamentals and Sovereign Risk of Emerging Markets

We empirically assess the relative importance of various economic fundamentals in accounting for the sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads of emerging markets during 2004–2012, which encompasses the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. Inflation, state fragility, external debt and commodity terms of trade volatility were positively associated, while trade openness and a more favourable fiscal balance/GDP ratio were negatively associated with sovereign CDS spreads. Yet the relative importance of economic fundamentals in the pricing of sovereign risk varies over time. The key factors are trade openness and state fragility in the pre‐crisis period, the external debt/GDP ratio and inflation in the crisis period, and inflation and the public debt/GDP ratio in the post‐crisis period. Asian countries enjoy lower sovereign spreads than Latin American countries, and this gap widened during and after the crisis. Trade openness was the biggest factor behind Asia's lower sovereign spreads before the crisis, and inflation during and after the crisis. The results imply that external factors were paramount in pricing sovereign risk prior to the crisis, but internal factors associated with the capacity to adjust to adverse shocks gained prominence during and after the crisis.     

An Alternative Approach to the Institutional Economics of the Eurozone Crisis

I argue that the Eurozone crisis is neither a crisis of European sovereigns in the sense of governmental over-borrowing, nor a crisis of sovereign debt market over-lending. Rather, it is a function of the “sovereign debt market” institution itself. Crisis, I argue, is not an occurrence, but an element fulfilling a precise technical function within this institution. It ensures the possibility of designating — in the market’s day-to-day mechanisms rather than analytical hindsight — normal (tranquil, undisturbed) market functioning. To show this, I propose an alternative view on the institutional economics of sovereign debt markets. First, I engage literature on the emergent qualities of the institutions “market” and “firm” in product markets, concluding that the point of coalescence for markets is the approximation of an optimal observation of consumer tastes. I then examine the specific institution “financial markets,” where the optimal observation of economic fundamentals is decisive. For the specific sub-institution “sovereign debt market,” I conclude that the fundamentals in question — country fundamentals — oscillate between a status of observable fundamentals outside of markets and operationalized fundamentals influenced by market movements. This, in turn, allows me to argue that the specific case of the Eurozone crisis is due to neither of the two causes mentioned above. Rather, the notion of “crisis” takes on a technical sense within the market structure, guaranteeing the separation of herd behavior and isomorphic behavior on European sovereign debt markets. By the same token, the so-called Eurozone crisis ceases to be a crisis in the conventional sense.     

Crisis and self-fulfilling expectations: The Turkish experience in 1994 and 2000–2001

In this paper we analyze the role of fundamentals and self-fulfilling expectations in the crisis episodes of Turkey in 1994 and 2001. The question is how much of the occurrence of a crisis can be attributed to market expectations and how much to fundamentals. The model is estimated using a Markov switching framework in which the devaluation expectations affect crisis probability via three different specifications. Such a framework which allows for sunspots performs better than a purely fundamental-based model. The study shows that besides the fundamentals in the economy, shifts in agents' devaluation expectations have played a crucial role and that a Markov switching model with constant transition probabilities provides better estimates for the Turkish currency crises.     

Volatility spillovers and determinants of contagion: Exchange rate and equity markets during crises

We study the hourly volatility spillover between the equity markets of New York (DJI), London (FTSE 100) and Tokyo (N225) and their exchange rates (USD, EUR, GBP and JPY) for the period of 2001 through 2013 covering the non-crises period, the global financial crisis and the euro debt crisis. First, we find a general increase in spillover between the equity and exchange rate markets during the crisis periods. Second, pure contagion (attributable to irrational investors’ behavior) and fundamental contagion (measured by macroeconomic fundamentals) explains the increased spillover between the FTSE 100, N225 to the DJI during the global financial crisis and from the exchange rate markets to the DJI during the euro debt crisis.     

Fiscal Trends and Self-Fulfilling Crises

This paper develops a second-generation currency crisis model with endogenously changing fundamentals. Previous second-generation models are static, e.g. Obstfeld (1994 ), or dynamic with exogenous paths of fundamentals, e.g. Obstfeld (1986 ). In our model, the government weighs the disutility of making fundamentals consistent with a peg against a penalty for floating. If the former dominates, the government runs expansionary policies, precipitating a crisis. For some parameters, self-fulfilling speculation affects when the crisis happens, but not whether it happens. For other values, there are "purely self-fulfilling" crises, where a peg that could have survived forever collapses if attacked in the first few periods.     

Stock market crash of 2008: an empirical study of the deviation of share prices from company fundamentals

The aim of this study is to investigate quantitatively whether share prices deviated from company fundamentals in the stock market crash of 2008. For this purpose, we use a large database containing the balance sheets and share prices of 7796 worldwide companies for the period 2004–2013. We develop a panel regression model using three financial indicators – dividends per share, cash flow per share and book value per share – as explanatory variables for share price. We then estimate individual company fundamentals for each year by removing the time fixed effects from the two-way fixed effects model, which we identified as the best of the panel regression models.

Based on these results, we analyse the market anomaly quantitatively using the divergence rate – the rate of the deviation of share price from a company’s fundamentals. We find that share prices on average were overvalued in the period from 2005 to 2007 and were undervalued significantly in 2008, when the global financial crisis occurred. Share prices were equivalent to the fundamentals on average in the subsequent period. Our empirical results clearly demonstrate that the worldwide stock market fluctuated excessively in the time period before and just after the global financial crisis of 2008.     

ANALYSIS OF THE CURRENT ACCOUNT POSITION OF FOUR ASIAN COUNTRIES BEFORE THE 1997 CRISIS

Abstract.  The current paper presents an empirical analysis of the current account positions during the pre Asian crisis period, in the four most crisis-hit countries (namely Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea and Indonesia). We have employed the procedures advocated by Husted for the presence of stationarity in current accounts by estimating a cointegration relationship between any country's exports and imports. The results do not substantiate the presence of cointegration between the series, implying that the macroeconomic fundamentals in these countries prior to the crisis were far from robust, at least from the perspective of current account sustainability.     

Marxist Theories of Crisis and the Current Economic Crisis

Abstract

This paper uses data from the US economy and finds that among Marxist theories of crisis the marxian law of the falling rate of profit as a result of the increasing composition of capital explains the crisis of the 1970s and the end of the “golden age” of capital accumulation. Despite the dramatic increase in the rate of surplus value and the limited fall in the capital-output ratio profitability has not recovered sufficiently during the neoliberal period due to the survival of lagging capitals and the increasing use of unproductive labor. Financialization is one of the effects of low profitability. In the recent years financial bubbles the associated wealth effects and the significant increase in the debt of all domestic sectors raised aggregate demand and provided the stimulus for the anemic growth of the period. The break of the bubbles implies the return to the weak fundamentals of the real economy and possibly a deep and prolonged period of stagnation and crisis.     

EXCHANGE RATE MANIPULATION AND CONSTRUCTIVE AMBIGUITY

I consider dynamic models in which investors are heterogeneously informed about both foreign exchange interventions and exchange rate fundamentals and show that transparency sometimes exacerbates misalignment between the exchange rate and fundamentals. Although transparency reveals information about fundamentals, it also increases the precision of the exchange rate as a signal of those fundamentals that remain unknown (the signal‐precision effect of transparency). If a central bank announcement reveals little information about fundamentals, then this effect dominates and transparency magnifies misalignment. One implication is that ambiguity can increase the effectiveness of intervention to support a declining currency during times of crisis.     

On the time-varying relationship between EMU sovereign spreads and their determinants

We use a dynamic multipath general-to-specific algorithm to capture structural instability in the link between euro area sovereign bond yield spreads against Germany and their underlying determinants over the period January 1999–August 2011. We offer new evidence suggesting a significant heterogeneity across countries, both in terms of the risk factors determining spreads over time as well as in terms of the magnitude of their impact on spreads. Our findings suggest that the relationship between euro area sovereign risk and the underlying fundamentals is strongly time-varying, turning from inactive to active since the onset of the global financial crisis and further intensifying during the sovereign debt crisis. As a general rule, the set of financial and macro spreads' determinants in the euro area is rather unstable but generally becomes richer and stronger in significance as the crisis evolves.     

Exchange rate regime,real misalignment and currency crises

Based on 69 sample countries, this paper examines the effect of macroeconomic fundamentals on real effective exchange rates (REER) in these sample countries. Using the misalignment of actual REER from its equilibrium level, we have estimated the factors explaining the extent of currency over- or under-valuation. Overall, we find that the higher the flexibility of the currency regime, the lower is the misalignment. The estimates are robust to different sub-samples of countries. We then explore the impact of such misalignment on the probability of a currency crisis in the next period, indicating the extent to which misalignment could be used as a leading indicator of a potential crisis. This paper thus makes a new contribution to the debate on the choice of exchange rate regime by bringing together real exchange rate misalignment and currency crisis literature.     

Predicting the Crises of the Greek Drachma

The paper investigates the role of fundamentals in the speculative episodes experienced by the Greek drachma during the 1990s, and examines whether the openness of the Greek economy has altered the role of fundamentals in the likelihood of a currency crisis. An interesting aspect of the empirical analysis is that the crises are related significantly to macroeconomic fundamentals of the Greek economy. The analysis shows that the openness of the Greek economy has introduced new elements and concerns in the predictability of speculative attacks on the drachma.     

Do macroeconomic fundamentals affect exchange market pressure? Evidence from bounds testing approach for Turkey

This article investigates the relationship between Exchange Market Pressure (EMP) and macroeconomic fundamentals in Turkey using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing procedure and Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) within the framework of the canonical currency crisis models. The results of the bounds tests suggest the existence of a level relationship between EMP and the selected macroeconomic fundamentals. The results of the VECM also suggest that there exists a unidirectional causation that runs from those macroeconomic fundamentals to EMP in the case of the Turkish Economy.     

Fundamentals,beliefs, and financial contagion

We study contagion in a model in which financial crises can occur due to both weak fundamentals and adverse self-fulfilling expectations. Contagion emerges only if a crisis in one country leads international investors to rationally update beliefs about fundamentals in other countries. But purely expectational crises may be contagious, as investors may infer that fundamentals are weak. Hence, the structure of information is crucial. The analysis delivers useful lessons for assessing which countries are more vulnerable to contagion, which types of crises are more infectious, and whether increased transparency ameliorates contagion effects.     

Evaluating currency crises: A Bayesian Markov switching approach

In this paper we examine the nature of a currency crisis. We do so by employing an out-of-sample forecasting exercise to analyse the Mexican crisis in 1994. Forecast evaluation was based on modern econometric techniques concerning the shape of forecaster’s loss function. We also extend the empirical framework suggested by Jeanne and Masson [Jeanne, O., Masson, P., 2000. Currency crises and Markov-switching regimes. Journal of International Economics 50, 327–350] to test for the hypothesis that the currency crisis was driven by sunspots. To this end we contribute to the existing literature by comparing Markov regime switching model with a time-varying transition probabilities with two alternative models. The first is a Markov regime switching model with constant transition probabilities. The second is a linear benchmark model. Empirical results show that the proxy for the probability of devaluation is an important factor explaining the nature of currency crisis. More concretely, when the expectation market pressure was used as a proxy of probability of devaluation, forecast evaluation supports the view that currency crisis was driven by market expectation unrelated to fundamentals. Alternatively, when interest rate differential is used as a proxy for probability of devaluation, currency crisis was due to predictable deterioration of fundamentals.     

The effect of financial liberalization on banking sector stability

Several studies indicate that financial liberalization increases likelihood of a financial crisis without distinguishing between a normal period, unstable period preceding the onset of banking panics and crisis/post period. We explain in this paper the relationship between financial liberalization and banking sector vulnerability. Then, we argue that banking sector turmoil is most likely to occur after an intermediate degree of liberalization. Using a recently updated dataset for financial reforms, we find an inverted U-shaped relationship between liberalization and the likelihood of banking crisis for a sample of 49 countries between 1980 and 2010. We used a multinomial logit model in order to take into account what is called the ‘post crisis bias’. We ask whether the relationship remains when institutional characteristics of countries and dynamic effects of liberalization are considered. The empirical results indicate that the relationship between liberalization and banking sector stability depends strongly on the strength of capital regulation and supervision. With very weak regulation and supervision, the probability of banking crises is increasing with liberalization but this relationship is reversed as regulation and supervision become significant. The most important type of liberalization in relation to banking crises seems to be operational. A policy implication is that positive growth effects of liberalization can be achieved without increasing the risk of a banking fragility if appropriate institutions are developed.     

A monetary Minsky model of the Great Moderation and the Great Recession

Steve Keen's model of Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis (Keen, 1995) displayed qualitative characteristics that matched the real macroeconomic and income-distributional outcomes of the preceding and subsequent fifteen years: a period of economic volatility followed by a period of moderation, leading to a rise of instability once more and a serious economic crisis. This paper extends that model to build a strictly monetary macroeconomic model which can generate the monetary as well as the real phenomena manifested by both The Great Recession and The Great Moderation.     

A Theoretical Model of Financial Crisis

The paper develops a new model of private debt financing with an inefficient financial system at its core, where inefficiency is characterized by costly loan monitoring. The model suggests a mechanism that generates the following series of events: a period of low capital inflow despite high rates of economic growth (capital inflow inertia), as observed in the take-off era in the Asian tiger economies; followed by a sudden acceleration of capital inflow (as seen in the 1990s); and then by a crisis, which is defined as a large reduction in the amount of loans intermediated by the financial system (i.e., a large capital outflow or credit crunch). Under certain conditions, financial crisis can occur even when economic fundamentals and market sentiment change only slightly. Unlike most credit rationing models, the results presented here do not hinge on the assumption of asymmetric information. The model also provides guidance about the appropriate policy responses to an imminent crisis.     

Contagion of self-fulfilling financial crises due to diversification of investment portfolios

We look at two countries that have independent fundamentals, but share the same group of investors. Each country might face a self-fulfilling crisis: Agents withdrawing their investments fearing that others will. A crisis in one country reduces agents’ wealth. This makes them more averse to the strategic risk associated with the unknown behavior of other agents in the second country, increasing their incentive to withdraw their investments. Consequently, the probability of a crisis there increases. This generates a positive correlation between the returns in the two countries. Since diversification affects returns in our model, its welfare implications are non-trivial.     

Macroeconomic tail risk,currency crises and the inter-war gold standard

We introduce macroeconomic tail risk into the canonical global game model of currency crises. The exchange rate peg is attacked if fundamentals reach a critical threshold, or if there is a sufficiently large public shock. Large shocks generate doubt amongst investors about both the state of the world and about what others know, giving rise to multiple equilibria. We find a non-monotonic relationship between tail risk and the probability of (a fundamentals-based) crisis and show how this effect depends on the magnitude and direction of public shocks. We consider the implications of policy intervention and identify conditions under which active intervention produces doubt about the level of fundamentals and, hence, how others will respond. Our analysis clarifies how financial contagion in Europe precipitated the sterling crisis of 1931.