Return spillover analysis across central bank digital currency attention and cryptocurrency markets

Many central banks have now developed their digital currencies in response to the challenges posed by the proliferation of decentralised digital cryptocurrencies. However, little is known about the effects of the introduction of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) on extant digital cryptocurrencies. This paper, therefore, aims to identify both the time- and frequency-domain spillover effects among cryptocurrency markets and a newly developed central bank digital currencies attention index (CBDCAI) by using two TVP-VAR-based spillover models. Our results demonstrate that CBDC attention significantly impacts cryptocurrency markets. Also, most investors in cryptocurrency markets are more likely to trade in the short term. The results of this study contribute to helping investors and investment institutions effectively avoid investment risks, reduce losses, and predict the return of some cryptocurrencies. Also help policymakers better understand the impact of markets and policies, and provide a reference for them to formulate policies.     

Hedging role of stablecoins

Wild price fluctuations of cryptocurrencies make it difficult for investors to maintain stable asset values. This study investigates the hedging properties of US dollar (USD)-pegged stablecoins against bitcoin returns. We analyzed the hedging abilities of the three largest stablecoins—namely, Tether, USD Coin, and Binance USD—using the dynamic conditional correlation–generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity, dummy variable regression, vector autoregression, and impulse response functions. We found that stablecoins are generally negatively correlated with bitcoin returns, indicating that they can be effective hedging instruments against high-volatility crypto assets. Among the stablecoins, Binance USD offers the largest risk reduction, and Tether was a weak safe haven during the COVID-19 crisis period. Crypto investors can diversify their portfolios by holding stablecoins.     

CBDC uncertainty: Financial market implications

The current state of the art in the central bank digital currency (CBDC) literature views indexes constructed from digital currency news to be fully informed about CBDC uncertainty and its impact on the financial system. We argue that the hedging behavior of participants in the currency futures market could be more informative than CBDC uncertainty news in the presence of limited risk absorption capacity in futures markets. We show that the hedging factor has a statistically significant effect on financial market risk aversion and measures of uncertainty. The hedging behavior of currency futures market participants is informative of agents' reactions to the news and central bank policies around CBDC. Our results also show that CBDC uncertainty is a significant risk transmitter in the financial system. Hence, this characteristic makes the hedging factor even more important because it can directly impact risk aversion via its moderating effects, which later influence CBDC uncertainty.     

The determinants of issuing central bank digital currencies

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) are considered ‘digital fiat currencies’ that do not have a physical form, which is a key distinction from conventional fiat money. This study aims to identify factors that influence central banks’ decisions in taking advanced actions to issue CBDC, namely, the economic, market, demographic and technical factors. Data is collected from the CBDC Tracker and the WB database for the period 2013–2021. We applied the Pooled OLS estimations to examine the impact of the key factors on being in an advanced stage for issuing CBDC; moreover, probit and logistic regression are employed to robust our results and overcome the limitations of Pooled OLS. The findings demonstrate that underdeveloped economies are more engaged in issuing CBDC. Besides, better regulations, FDI inflow, young populations, and more urban societies would increase the probability of CBDC issuance. Nevertheless, results show the impact of technical factors is heterogeneous across countries.     

The impact of central bank digital currency news on the stock and cryptocurrency markets: Evidence from the TVP-VAR model

This study employs a non-linear framework to investigate the impacts of central bank digital currency (CBDC) news on the financial and cryptocurrency markets. The time-varying vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model developed by Primiceri (2005) is estimated based on weekly data from the first week of January 2015 to the last week of December 2021. The vector of endogenous variables in the VAR estimation contains the Central Bank Digital Currency uncertainty index (CBDCU), cryptocurrency policy uncertainty index, S&P 500 index, VIX, and Bitcoin price. The TVP-VAR model’s time-varying responses demonstrated that the reactions of the cryptocurrency market to central bank digital currency announcements vary remarkably over time. The impacts of the CBDC shocks on the financial market have been increasingly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the time-varying forecast error decompositions, CBDCU and VIX shocks have accounted for most of the variance in cryptocurrency uncertainty and Bitcoin return shocks, notably during the COVID-19 period.     

Volatility transmission in emerging European foreign exchange markets

This paper studies the dynamics of volatility transmission between Central European (CE) currencies and the EUR/USD foreign exchange using model-free estimates of daily exchange rate volatility based on intraday data. We formulate a flexible yet parsimonious parametric model in which the daily realized volatility of a given exchange rate depends both on its own lags as well as on the lagged realized volatilities of the other exchange rates. We find evidence of statistically significant intra-regional volatility spillovers among the CE foreign exchange markets. With the exception of the Czech and, prior to the recent turbulent economic events, Polish currencies, we find no significant spillovers running from the EUR/USD to the CE foreign exchange markets. To measure the overall magnitude and evolution of volatility transmission over time, we construct a dynamic version of the Diebold–Yilmaz volatility spillover index and show that volatility spillovers tend to increase in periods characterized by market uncertainty.     

Accounting for digital currencies

The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) to investigate some of the main issues surrounding the classification of digital currencies, and (ii) to identify the accounting practices and standards tied to digital currencies. This paper discusses two different types of digital currencies, including: central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and privately issued cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. The findings of this study suggest that current accounting standards do not precisely cover the accounting treatment of digital currencies, even though the estimated value of market capitalisation of cryptocurrency in 2022 was USD 200 billion. This conceptual paper identifies the imminent need for an accounting standard to provide guidance on the identification, classification, measurement, and presentation of digital currencies. In the interim, existing accounting standards can be amended to incorporate digital currencies to avoid inconsistent global accounting approaches.     

How does economic policy uncertainty affect the bitcoin market?

This paper examines how economic policy uncertainty (EPU) impacts the Bitcoin (BTC) markets denominated in local currencies. We take BTC against British Pound (GBP) and the United States dollar (USD) as examples and construct the value-weighted BTC/GBP and BTC/USD composite indices. Our results show that the returns around the highest EPU days are significantly greater than those around the lowest EPU days. Further, the United States (US) EPU increases the volatility and trading volume of BTC after EPU spike days, whereas the United Kingdom (UK) EPU does not show such trends. Moreover, we observe a spillover effect for the US EPU to the UK BTC market. We further construct the dynamic conditional correlation (DCC)-GARCH model to test the dynamic correlation between EPU and BTC. Our results show that the effect of the US EPU on BTC/USD is greater than the effect of the UK EPU on BTC/GBP. Our empirical findings may provide insights for regulators to intervene in speculations in cryptocurrency markets effectively.     

Performance of Currency Trading Strategies in Developed and Emerging Markets: Some Striking Differences

Expanding the currency investment universe makes a lot of sense from a diversification point of view. Nevertheless, 60% of the total foreign exchange turnover is still only traded in three currency pairs (USD/EUR, USD/JPY and USD/GBP). The share of trading in local currencies in emerging markets is only around 5%. This can be explained by the fact that some currency managers fear investing in emerging market currencies. Many believe that political risk is the most dominant driver in these markets and that traditional investment rules do not work. In this paper, I apply four technical trading strategies for the developed market currencies and for the most traded emerging market currencies. The empirical results show some striking differences. They suggest that trend-following rules work better for emerging market currencies, while carry trading strategies perform better across developed market currencies. Nevertheless, it seems that conventional techniques could be successfully applied to both developed and emerging market currencies. I conclude that currency managers should not be afraid to diversify into emerging market currencies. They should, however, adjust their trading style accordingly.     

The illusion of the metaverse and meta-economy

This paper provides (i) a review of the existing literature on the metaverse and (ii) an empirical assessment of the current state of the Web3 meta-economy, with the focus on economic governance and metaverse commerce. We have analysed the entire Web3 metaverse niche, i.e. both the 196 available metaverse fungible tokens and all the non-fungible token (NFT) transactions belonging to the metaverse marketplace. Our results showed that economic governance is based on metaverse tokens that cannot be defined as reliable virtual currencies due to their explosive behaviour, negative performance, and higher volatility compared to traditional alternatives. Paradoxically, fiat currencies and stablecoins could be more appropriate candidates for the payment infrastructure. Moreover, we also observed that NFT prices are affected by the cryptocurrency market, which highlights the risk of metaverse commerce. For future research, developers and scholars must assess the different alternatives and infrastructures that can make the metaverse a persistent reality with a proper virtual economy. However, at present, it seems that the hype has run far ahead of reality.     

Risk appetite,carry trade and exchange rates

Using exchange rate data from four different countries (time zones), we examine the relationship between the Yen exchange rate against major currencies (i.e. USD/JPY, EUR/JPY, GBP/JPY, AUD/JPY and NZD/JPY) and measures of risk appetite (i.e. the S&P500 index, Dow Jones Industrial Average index and the VIX index). Our results show that the equity indexes, especially the Dow Jones Industrial Average, play a more important role in the determination of the Yen cross rates than VIX. The popular carry-trade currencies, i.e. NZD/JPY, AUD/JPY and GBP/JPY, are more affected by the US equity market than USD/JPY and EUR/JPY. While the long-term relationships are consistent across the four different time zones, the short-term dynamics are different. We find that the response of NZD/JPY, AUD/JPY and GBP/JPY to changes in the US stock market is much greater in the New Zealand and Australian zones than in the UK or US. Although the short-term relationship between exchange rates and the equity index is quite strong, the error correction speed is very sluggish. We also find evidence of asymmetric adjustment in the response of exchange rates to changes in global risk aversion. Carry trade currencies tend to appreciate gradually when conditions are favorable but fall sharply when market risk increases.     

Intra-safe haven currency behavior during the global financial crisis

We investigate intra-safe haven currency behavior during the recent global financial crisis. We first assess which safe haven currency is the “safest”. We then use non-temporal threshold analysis to investigate whether intra-safe haven currency behavior changes as market uncertainty increases. We find that the JPY is the “safest” of safe haven currencies and that only the JPY appreciates as market uncertainty increases regardless of the prevailing level of uncertainty. Our results may have important implications for central banks optimizing their relative composition of international currency reserve holdings with respect to returns in USD terms and for foreign currency market investors in general.     

Central bank digital currency: A systematic literature review using text mining approach

Central bank digital currency (CBDC) is seen as a possible next step in the evolution of money, offering a more stable unit of account, a more efficient medium of exchange, and a safer way to store value. However, since it began to get significant attention from academics and practitioners a few years ago, many concerns about how a central bank may build an efficient CBDC and how it would impact a country's current financial system still remain unanswered satisfactorily. Based on the combination of text mining and systematic review methods, this work presents a thorough literature assessment of 191 academic papers on CBDC in order to identify major research issues and knowledge gaps that may be addressed in the future. We find seven primary research themes linked to CBDC including (1) Central bank, (2) CBDC and other digital currency, (3) CBDC and money markets, (4) CBDC and monetary policy, (5) CBDC design and technologies, (6) CBDC and payment system, and (7) CBDC and financial stability and regulatory. The finding helps provide both overall and in-depth views of the current state of research in digital fiat currency topics, as well as drawing some important implications and suggestions on directions for the future research.     

泰达币(USDT)与人民币汇率相关性研究

全球规模最大的稳定币“泰达”币(USDT)在最近的司法调查中被发现涉嫌发行欺诈,受到全球高度关注。为考察USDT场外交易与人民币外汇交易之间的联系,本文首先构建了一个刻画人民币-USDT场外交易-比特币三角交易机制的理论模型,分析推导USDT人民币价格与人民币汇率之间的关系;然后使用独有的2019年10月至2020年10月USDT中国场外市场日度交易数据,实证检验了USDT(人民币)收益率、波动率与人民币汇率收益率、波动率之间的相关性;最后将实证结果与欧元、日元进行了国际比较。本文发现:(1)USDT的人民币价格收益率与人民币对美元汇率收益率负相关、波动率正相关,而USDT的欧元、日元价格收益率与它们对美元汇率收益率正相关、波动率负相关;(2)USDT的人民币、欧元、日元价格的波动率指标分别是各自汇率波动率的先行指标。本文研究结果表明,USDT稳定币与人民币外汇市场的联系是因为前者所具有的外汇黑市机制,同时稳定币作为桥梁,建立了加密资产市场与人民币外汇市场的联系。     

The intrinsic value of gold: An exchange rate-free price index

In this paper, we propose a gold price index that enables market participants to separate the change in the ‘intrinsic’ value of gold from changes in global exchange rates. The index is a geometrically weighted average of the price of gold denominated in different currencies, with weights that are proportional to the market power of each country in the global gold market. Market power is defined as the impact that a change in a country’s exchange rate has on the price of gold expressed in other currencies. We use principal components analysis to reduce the set of global exchange rates to four currency ‘blocs’ representing the U.S. dollar, the euro, the commodity currencies and the Asian currencies, respectively. We estimate the weight of each currency bloc in the index in an error correction framework using a broad set of variables to control for the unobserved intrinsic value. We show that the resulting index is less volatile than the USD price of gold and, in contrast with the USD price of gold, has a strong negative relationship with global equities and a strong positive relationship with the VIX index, both of which underline the role of gold as a safe haven asset.     

Are stablecoins truly diversifiers,hedges, or safe havens against traditional cryptocurrencies as their name suggests?

We study the diversifier, hedge, and safe haven properties of stablecoins against traditional cryptocurrencies. Using the DCC-GARCH model and dummy variable regression, we examine the risk-dispersion abilities of USD-pegged and gold-pegged stablecoins against traditional cryptocurrencies, and also compare their risk-dispersion abilities with their underlying assets. The empirical results show that (i) stablecoins can serve as safe havens in specific situations, although most act merely as an effective diversifier in normal market conditions; (ii) gold-pegged stablecoins perform worse as safe havens than USD-pegged ones, but both of them perform better than their corresponding underlying assets, and (iii) the safe haven property of stablecoins changes across market conditions. The above results are robust when using time-varying copula models. We further evaluate the risk management applications of stablecoins by analyzing mixed cryptocurrency-stablecoin portfolios, finding evidence of USD-pegged stablecoins performing better than gold-pegged stablecoins in extreme risk reductions. Our work provides important insights into diversification for cryptocurrency investors.     

Oil market uncertainty and excess returns on currency carry trade

This paper examines the role of oil market uncertainty on currency carry trade payoffs. We find that oil market uncertainty can impact currency carry trade excess returns. When oil market uncertainty rises, expected currency excess returns will increase. Our findings are robust to alternative measures of oil market uncertainty and, after controlling for traditional uncertainties, different types of oil shocks. The results also hold well in both developed and emerging markets, as well as for oil-related currencies, non-oil currencies, commodity currencies, and non-commodity currencies. Additionally, oil market uncertainty can be priced in the cross section of currency carry trade excess returns. This effect can be explained by investors becoming more risk averse under high oil market uncertainty and requiring greater compensation for bearing such risk. Moreover, our measure of oil market uncertainty, the downside risk from the oil market, is quite different from that of traditional aggregate measures.     

Does economic policy uncertainty drive the dynamic spillover among traditional currencies and cryptocurrencies? The role of the COVID-19 pandemic

The paper examines the dynamic spillover among traditional currencies and cryptocurrencies before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and investigates whether economic policy uncertainty (EPU) impacts this spillover. Based on the TVP-VAR approach, we find evidence of spillover effects among currencies, which increased widely during the pandemic. In addition, results suggest that almost all cryptocurrencies remain as “safe-haven” tools against market uncertainty during the COVID-19 period. Moreover, comparative analysis shows that the total connectedness for cryptocurrencies is lower than for traditional currencies during the crisis. Further analysis using quantile regression suggests that EPU exerts an impact on the total and the net spillovers with different degrees across currencies and this impact is affected by the health crisis. Our findings have important policy implications for policymakers, investors, and international traders.     

2013年4月国际金融市场运行综述

2013年4月,美元指数振荡下跌,欧元、英镑兑美元汇率振荡上升,美元兑日元汇率振荡上升;主要货币短期利率下降;日本中长期国债收益率上升,其他主要发达国家中长期国债收益率下降;全球主要股指振荡上涨。     

当前全球中央银行研究的若干重点问题

国际金融危机以来,世界经济形势发生了复杂而深远的变化,一些影响长期化的新现象、新问题、新概念不断涌现。作为全球重要的宏观经济研究力量,各国中央银行纷纷着手对后危机时代的新理念、新规律展开深入研究,并努力进行政策性的探索。本文重点讨论当前全球中央银行比较关注的三大问题:一是负利率政策的逻辑与效果;二是全球稳定币的宏观政策挑战;三是气候变化导致的宏观金融风险。现有宏观理论研究存在的不足及政策实践面临的新问题,对研究工作者而言,既是重大挑战,也是难得的历史性机遇。应立足中国国情,放眼全球百年变局,密切跟踪极具未来性的热点问题和理论前沿并将其科学应用于我国高质量发展时代的政策实践。