Granger causality of the inflation–growth mirror in accession countries*

The paper presents a model in which the exogenous money supply causes changes in the inflation rate and the output growth rate. While inflation and growth rate changes occur simultaneously, the inflation acts as a tax on the return to human capital and in this sense induces the growth rate decrease. Shifts in the model's credit sector productivity cause shifts in the income velocity of money that can break the otherwise stable relationship between money, inflation, and output growth. Applied to two accession countries, Hungary and Poland, a VAR system is estimated for each that incorporates endogenously determined multiple structural breaks. Results indicate Granger causality positively from money to inflation and negatively from inflation to growth for both Hungary and Poland, as suggested by the model, although there is some feedback to money for Poland. Three structural breaks are found for each country that are linked to changes in velocity trends, and to the breaks found in the other country.     

The inflationary experiences of six developing countries in Asia: an investigation of underlying determinants

This paper investigates major deteminats of the inflation rate in six Asian developing countries. The sample includes low and moderate-high inflation cases. For the investigation a monetarist model of the inflation rate adjusted to account for important external factors is used. The results show that the growth of the money stock was not a primary source of inflation in all countries. However, various factors that influence the public's willingness to hold money are behind inflationary pressures across countries. Among these, some are external factors stemming from changes in foreign interst rates and import prices. Overall, the evidence suggests that the success of domestic policy in fighting inflation is highly dependent on the unique inflationary experience of each country.     

Shortage and currency substitution in transition economies: Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Romania

This paper examines currency substitution in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Romania during the end of central planning and transition to market economies. Before liberalization, central European economies faced increasing shortage and repressed inflation in the official sector. Households held substantial wealth in real assets and foreign currency. Furthermore, part of their savings was held as hunting money against potential opportunities to buy in bulk at bargain prices in official stores or pay a premium price on the black market. The shift from centrally-planned to market economies is modeled with a shortage variable. Foreign currency demand and consumption functions are estimated by the Johansen procedure. Environmental constraints play a key role in interpreting estimates. The official sector shortage is an important determinant of foreign currency demand in each country.     

Domestic and International Sources of Inflation in Developing Countries: Some Evidence from the Monetary Approach

Using the monetary approach, this paper examines empirically the causes of inflation in twenty-five developing countries. In addition to money supply, the underlying money demand function and foreign exchange rates are taken into account in the inflationary process. The lag structures are determined by Akaike's FPE criterion and the exogeneity assumptions are assessed by Granger-type causality tests. The results suggest that the monetary approach provides adequate explanation of inflation across all countries examined. Besides changes in expected inflation and foreign exchange rates, movements in base money in these countries have significantly contributed to their inflationary pressures. [134, 431]     

News and correlations of CEEC-3 financial markets

We employ DCC-MGARCH models to investigate conditional correlations between six CEEC-3 financial markets. In general, the highest correlations exist between Hungary and Poland in foreign exchange and stock markets. Short-term money markets are somewhat isolated from each other. We find that the associations of CEEC-3 exchange rates versus euro are weaker than those versus the US dollar. The persistence of the effect of shocks on the time-varying correlations is strongest for foreign exchange and stock markets, indicating a tendency toward contagion. In searching for the origins of financial market volatility in the CEEC-3, we uncover some evidence of Granger-causality on the foreign exchange markets. Finally, using a pool model, we investigate the impact of euro area, US, and CEEC-3 news on the correlations. Apart from ECB monetary policy news, we observe no broad effects of international news on correlations; instead, local news exerts an influence, which suggests a dominance of country- or market-specific circumstances.     

Currency substitution and seignorage in eastern europe

Economic and political uncertainty, high inflation and liberalization of foreign exchange restrictions have encouraged substantial currency substitution in the economies in transition. This paper presents empirical evidence on currency substitution in four Eastern European countries in transition: Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. It is shown how currency substitution affects money demand and by that seignorage revenues. The empirical estimates of the money demand functions are used to calculate the seignorage maximizing rate of inflation in the economies in transition.     

Foreign Direct Investment and Enterprise Restructuring in Central Europe

Foreign direct investment is at the forefront of economic policy decisions in Central Europe, as it is expected to accelerate enterprise restructuring and aid in the successful transition to a market economy. This paper contains a panel data study of the effects of FDI in 11 different manufacturing sectors within three Central European economies: Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. We find evidence that FDI has increased labour productivity levels in most manufacturing sectors. We are able to differentiate between sectors with a high elasticity of substitution between labour and capital and those that are inelastic. We have also presented evidence to support the theory that the impact on labour productivity is predominantly due to the intangible assets introduced by foreign firms, rather than simply the fixed capital investment associated with FDI.     

Equilibrium Exchange Rates in New EU Members: External Imbalances versus Real Convergence

In new EU members, the accumulation of net foreign liabilities has gone hand-in-hand with real exchange rate appreciations, contrary to intuition. This may be due to the induced effect that capital inflows on productivity and competitiveness (Balassa-Samuelson effect). An extended empirical model comprising relative productivity and net foreign assets is well-suited to capture this indirect, opposite effect of liabilities accumulation on the equilibrium exchange rates for the three largest economies: Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic. The model makes it possible to estimate equilibrium exchange rates and misalignments. Going forward, sustaining high productivity growth will be essential to ensure a smooth transition towards euro membership.     

Money demand in Hungary and Poland

This paper analyses the determinants and the stability of money demand functions in Hungary and Poland, using an error-correction framework. The null of stable cointegration relationships cannot be rejected in some specifications. The results suggest that long-run parameters are in line with economic theory. While judging the appropriateness of different strategies of monetary policy on the basis of these findings alone would be premature, the paper suggests that money demand functions can serve as a useful reference for monetary authorities.     

Information disclosure and exchange media

When commitment is lacking, intertemporal trade is facilitated with the use of exchange media—interpreted broadly to include monetary and collateral assets. We study the properties of a model commonly used to motivate monetary exchange, extended to include a physical asset whose expected short-run return is subject to a news shock, but whose expected long-run return is stable. The nondisclosure of news enhances the asset?s property as an exchange medium, and generally improves social welfare. When a nondisclosure policy is infeasible, the framework admits a role for government debt, including fiat money. When lump-sum taxation is not permitted, fiat money may still improve welfare—but only if its circulation is supported by a cash-in-advance constraint.     

Determinants of foreign direct investment: empirical evidence from EU accession candidates

This study examines bilateral foreign direct investments (FDI) between the members of the European Union and eight central and east European candidate (CEEC) economies in transition, awaiting accession into the European Union (EU). Cross-section data were obtained for Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovak Republic, and Slovenia for 1997. Once the main characteristics of FDI recipient and donor nations are identified in a bilateral framework, it will be feasible to predict future FDI inflows. This study reveals that the key determinants of FDI inflows in CEECs are size of the host economy, host country risk, labour costs in host country, and openness to trade. Countries that are receiving fewer foreign investments could make themselves more attractive to potential donor nations by focusing on some of the key determinants identified by this study.     

Transmission of monetary policy and exchange rate shocks under foreign currency lending

This paper analyses the differences in reaction of domestic and foreign currency lending to monetary and exchange rate shocks, using a panel VAR model estimated for the three biggest Central and Eastern European countries (Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary). Our results point toward a drop in domestic currency loans and an increase of foreign currency credit in reaction to monetary policy tightening in Poland and Hungary, suggesting that the presence of foreign currency debt weakens the transmission of monetary policy. A currency depreciation shock leads to an initial decline in foreign currency lending, but also in loans denominated in domestic currency as central banks react to a weaker exchange rate by increasing the interest rates. However, after several quarters, credit in foreign currency accelerates, indicating that borrowers start using it to substitute for depressed domestic currency lending.     

Imagery and Financial Judgment

Many studies have indicated that a buy-and-hold investment strategy is superior to a trading strategy. This is thought to be true because trading incurs transaction costs that lower net returns compared to a buy-and-hold strategy. We propose a behavioral finance argument to illustrate that merely switching between positive expected return assets can lead to a long-run negative expected return, even when transaction costs are ignored. This counterintuitive result may obtain because of Parrondo's Paradox. We provide a stylized theoretical example that demonstrates how a trader can lose money by trading between assets with positive long-run expected returns. We also present simulation results to support our example. Thus, long-run negative results from trading may not be due entirely to transaction costs. A trading strategy may prove inferior to buy-and-hold for agents simply because of their singular trading patterns, as we outline in the paper.     

Monetary Policy Rules for Transition Economies: An Empirical Analysis

In this paper, we investigate the monetary policy reaction functions for the new European Union member states. We find interesting differences when looking at both interest rates (the Taylor rule) and monetary base (the McCallum rule) as monetary policy rules. Monetary aggregate is more likely to react to the deviation of inflation from its target, while short‐term interest rates are highly sensitive to the deviation of exchange rates in the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. For Hungary and Romania, both interest rates and money are responsive to inflation. In empirical literature, much attention is paid to the use of the Taylor‐type rule for developed economies. However, our empirical results raise questions on the reliance of this rule for these transition economies.     

Don’t fear risk,learn about it: how familiarity reduces perceived risk

This article suggests that learning about basic concepts concerning the risk and return of assets will reduce perceived risk. We show experimentally that people who learn about these basic concepts are willing to allocate more money to risky assets and consider the asset’s return relative to its risk.     

Multilateral currency substitution and capital flows as sources of instability in the soe demand for money function — A case study

Using monthly data for Ireland we test the hypothesis that the combined effects of currency substitution and capital mobility renders the demand for money function subject to instability over time. The empirical evidence supports the view that both “the” expected exchange rate change, giving rise to currency substitution, and the latter as a component, along with “the” foreign interest rate, of the gross yield on foreign currency-denominated assets, giving rise to capital mobility, are important determinants of the domestic demand for money. Their inclusion as arguments yields a money demand function which is more stable than if they are (incorrectly) excluded.     

Does the currency board matter? US news and Argentine financial market reaction

Using a Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model, we study the effects of the US monetary policy and macroeconomic announcements on Argentine money, stock and foreign exchange markets over the period January 1998 to July 2007. We show, first, that both types of news have a significant impact on all markets. Second, there are noticeable differences in reaction for different subsamples: Argentine money markets were more dependent on US news under the currency board than after it was abandoned as the floating exchange rate partly absorbs spillover effects from the US. Finally, we find that the US-dollar-denominated assets react less to US news than peso-denominated assets, which suggests that the currency board was not completely credible during its final years.     

Monetary policy and asset prices

The purpose of this paper is study the effect of monetary policy on asset prices. We study the properties of a monetary model in which a real asset is valued for its rate of return and for its liquidity. We show that money is essential if and only if real assets are scarce, in the precise sense that their supply is not sufficient to satisfy the demand for liquidity. Our model generates a clear connection between asset prices and monetary policy. When money grows at a higher rate, inflation is higher and the return on money decreases. In equilibrium, no arbitrage amounts to equating the real return of both objects. Therefore, the price of the asset increases in order to lower its real return. This negative relationship between inflation and asset returns is in the spirit of research in finance initiated in the early 1980s.     

The role and impact of monetary policy in CEFTA countries

An effective monetary policy requires a stable relationship between the money stock and macroeconomic variables such as output, price level, interest rates, and exchange rates. A dynamism of structural changes in transition economies of eastern Europe makes such stability far from obvious. This is reflected in the fact that a stable demand for money function cannot be estimated even for the most advanced East European countries: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Empirical analysis of the relationship between nominal variables indicates rather limited relationships as well. Therefore, all that can be expected from monetary policy in eastern Europe is not to be too tight so as to starve the economy of needed liquidity and not to be too loose so as to ignite inflation.     

The monetary approach to exchange rates in the CEECs1

A panel dataset for six Central and Eastern European countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) is used to estimate the monetary exchange rate model with panel cointegration methods, including the Pooled Mean Group estimator, the Fully Modified Least Square estimator and the Dynamic Least Square estimator. The monetary model is able to convincingly explain the long‐run exchange rate relationships of a group of CEECs, particularly when this is supplemented by a Balassa–Samuelson effect. Our estimated long‐run monetary equations are used to compute equilibrium exchange rates. Finally, we discuss the implications for the accession of selected countries to the European Economic and Monetary Union.