Mean reversion in long-horizon real exchange rates: Evidence from Latin America

This paper examines mean reversion in real effective exchange rates in six leading Latin American economies during the XXth century using a new data set. A unit-root approach is complemented by an error-correction model including key fundamentals such as terms of trade, trade openness and relative productivities. Unit-root testing shows a very slow process of reversion – if any – to a constant mean in the original series, rejecting the strict PPP hypothesis; however, mean reversion is found after allowing for trends and structural breaks with a half-life average of 1½ years for the six countries. We also found reversion to a conditional mean defined by the co-integrating relationship with an average half-life of 2½ years. Our estimates, although lower than the 3–5 year range that motivated the Rogoff’s puzzle, still indicate the presence of important obstacles to the adjustment process that need further investigation.     

金融发展、对外贸易与中国就业增长——基于省际面板数据的实证分析

金融发展与对外贸易的开展对一国就业增长有着深远的影响。本文利用中国31省际面板数据（1997-2009）,实证检验了金融发展、对外贸易及二者之间的交互效应对就业增长的影响。研究结果表明,仅对外贸易促进了就业增长,而金融发展及其与对外贸易的交互效应与就业增长之间呈负相关关系。最后本文提出了相关的政策建议。     

International trade and finance: Complementaries in the United Kingdom 1870-1913 and the United States 1920-1930

Do international trade and finance flow together? In a variety of theoretical models, trade and finance can be shown to have the potential to be substitutes or complements, so the matter must be resolved empirically. We study trade and financial flows from the United Kingdom from 1870 to 1913 and the United States in the interwar years. These were the two major capital exporters and key financial centers in each era. We find that trade and finance were robustly correlated for each case. We consider simultaneity issues. We also discuss evidence from the British Empire which casts doubt on the idea that trade is a punishment device in the event of a default.     

金融发展、对外贸易与中国就业增长——基于省际面板数据的实证分析

金融发展与对外贸易对一国就业增长有着深远的影响。本文利用1997—2009年中国31个省的面板数据,实证检验了金融发展、对外贸易及二者之间的交互效应对就业增长的影响。     

金融发展、汇改最优次序与长期经济增长--基于118个经济体的面板模型的分析

本文构建由金融发展、资本开放、汇率制度与产出增长组成的理论模型,选取世界上118个经济体1972-2016年的宏观数据,综合运用动态面板、面板门槛与面板IV模型进行实证分析。本文得出主要结论为:第一,在汇率制度弹性对长期经济增长的边际影响中,金融发展水平呈显著为正的调节效应;第二,对于金融发展水平较高的国家,汇率制度弹性在资本项目开放度与长期经济增长之间存在显著正向的调节效应;第三,在金融发展水平较高时,对外贸易开放度在汇率制度弹性与长期经济增长之间存在显著为正的中介效应。借鉴历史发展经验,本文归纳出"先发展国内金融市场,再开放浮动汇率,最后加强资本开放"的汇改最优次序,为我国克服汇率制度改革难点、推进资本项目开放、维持经济基本面稳定增长提出合理化政策建议。     

Foreign currency debt,financial crises and economic growth: A long-run view

Foreign currency debt is widely believed to increase risks of financial crisis, especially after being implicated as a cause of the East Asian crisis in the late 1990s. In this paper, we study the effects of foreign currency debt on currency and debt crises and its indirect effects on short-term growth and long-run output effects in both 1880–1913 and 1973–2003 for 45 countries. Greater ratios of foreign currency debt to total debt are associated with increased risks of currency and debt crises, although the strength of the association depends crucially on the size of a country's reserve base and its policy credibility. We found that financial crises, driven by exposure to foreign currency, resulted in significant permanent output losses. We estimate some implications of our findings for the risks posed by currently high levels of foreign currency liabilities in eastern Europe.     

How demand scale affect services exports? Evidence from financial development perspective

China's service trade is increasingly capable of "going out," but there are still problems of uneven and insufficient economic development. This study uses bilateral services trade data from 2000 to 2018 to conduct empirical testing using the extended mutual gravity model and the threshold effect model. The results show that (i) an expansion in the size of the domestic market can significantly boost a country's service exports, and the magnitude of the impact is rising year by year. (ii) The development of the financial sector can strengthen the local market effect by increasing demand, thus promoting foreign exports. Financial development has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between demand size and the exports of service trade. (iii) Under the influence of the level of financial development, there is a "threshold effect" of domestic market demand size on service exports. This threshold effect varies among different types of services and different country categories. This study provides macro evidence that the scale of demand affects service exports and has important theoretical implications for the formulation of national service trade policies.     

Thresholds in the process of international financial integration

The financial crisis has re-ignited the fierce debate about the merits of financial globalization and its implications for growth, especially for developing countries. The empirical literature has not been able to conclusively establish the presumed growth benefits of financial integration. Indeed, a new literature proposes that the indirect benefits of financial integration may be more important than the traditional financing channel emphasized in previous analyses. A major complication, however, is that there seem to be certain “threshold” levels of financial and institutional development that an economy needs to attain before it can derive the indirect benefits and reduce the risks of financial openness. In this paper, we develop a unified empirical framework for characterizing such threshold conditions. We find that there are clearly identifiable thresholds in variables such as financial depth and institutional quality—the cost-benefit trade-off from financial openness improves significantly once these threshold conditions are satisfied. We also find that the thresholds are lower for foreign direct investment and portfolio equity liabilities compared to those for debt liabilities.     

Openness and the finance-growth nexus

Rajan and Zingales (2003) hypothesize that openness—trade and financial—is a crucial determinant of financial development. The main policy implication emerging from this hypothesis is that openness should be promoted as a means of facilitating economic growth through financial development. While subsequent research confirms that openness affects financial development, we study whether finance continues to be growth promoting as economies become increasingly open—a key implicit assumption behind the policy recommendation. Using data from 78 economies for the period 1981–2006, we find that very high levels of financial openness generally erode the growth-promoting role of financial development while high trade openness strengthens it. These worldwide findings by and large hold for subsamples of Sub-Saharan African, Latin American and OECD economies. Notable exceptions are the invariance of the finance-growth (FG) nexus on trade openness in OECD economies and the positive effect of financial openness on the FG link in Latin American economies.     

Regionality revisited: An examination of the direction of spread of currency crises

What determines the direction of spread of currency crises? We examine data on waves of currency crises in 1992, 1994, 1997, and 1998 to evaluate several hypotheses on the determinants of contagion. We simultaneously consider trade competition, financial links, and institutional similarity to the “ground zero” country as potential drivers of contagion. To overcome data limitations and account for model uncertainty, we utilize Bayesian methodologies hitherto unused in the empirical literature on contagion. In particular, we use the Bayesian averaging of binary models that allows us to take into account the uncertainty regarding the appropriate set of regressors.We find that institutional similarity to the ground zero country plays an important role in determining the direction of contagion in all the emerging market currency crises in our dataset. We thus provide persuasive evidence in favour of the “wake-up call” hypothesis for financial contagion. Trade and financial links may also play a role in determining the direction of contagion, but their importance varies amongst the crisis periods.     

Comparative advantage,demand for external finance,and financial development

This paper analyzes the effect of comparative advantage in international trade on a country's level of financial development. Countries with comparative advantage in financially intensive goods experience a higher demand for external finance, and therefore financial development. By contrast, financial development is lower in countries that primarily export goods which do not rely on external finance. We use disaggregated trade data to develop a measure of a country's external finance need of exports, and demonstrate this effect empirically. In order to overcome the simultaneity problem, we develop a novel instrumentation strategy based on the exogenous geographic determinants of trade patterns.     

The dark side of global integration: Increasing tail dependence

We measure stock market coexceedances using the methodology of Cappiello, Gerard and Manganelli (2005, ECB Working Paper 501). This method enables us to measure comovement at each point of the return distribution. First, we construct annual coexceedance probabilities for both lower and upper tail return quantiles using daily data from 1974–2006. Next, we explain these probabilities in a panel gravity model framework. Results show that macroeconomic variables asymmetrically impact stock market comovement across the return distribution. Financial liberalization significantly increases left tail comovement, whereas trade integration significantly increases comovement across all quantiles. Decreasing exchange rate volatility results in increasing lower tail comovement. The introduction of the euro increases comovement across the entire return distribution, thereby significantly reducing the benefits of portfolio diversification within the euro area.     

Law,Finance, and Economic Growth

This paper examines how the legal environment affects financial development, and then asks how this in turn is linked to long-run economic growth. Financial intermediaries are better developed in countries with legal and regulatory systems that (1) give a high priority to creditors receiving the full present value of their claims on corporations, (2) enforce contracts effectively, and (3) promote comprehensive and accurate financial reporting by corporations. The data also indicate that the exogenous component of financial intermediary development—the component defined by the legal and regulatory environment—is positively associated with economic growth. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: G21, K12, O16     

Time-varying market integration and stock and bond return concordance in emerging markets

We investigate the extent to which emerging stock market integration affects the joint behavior of stock and bond returns using a two-stage semi-parametric approach. Using a sample of 18 emerging markets, we find an unambiguous and robust link between emerging stock market integration and stock–bond return decoupling. We explain this with a decline in the segmentation risk premia in equities modeled by De Jong and De Roon [De Jong, F., De Roon, F.A., 2005. Time-varying market integration and expected returns in emerging markets. Journal of Financial Economics 78, 583–613] that leads to increased demand for stocks and reduced or unchanged demand for bonds. Our findings deliver new insights into the financial liberalization and stock–bond comovement literatures.     

Bubbles and capital flow volatility: Causes and risk management

Emerging market economies are fertile ground for the development of real estate and other financial bubbles. Despite these economies’ significant growth potential, their corporate and government sectors do not generate the financial instruments to provide residents with adequate stores of value. Capital often flows out of these economies seeking these stores of value in the developed world. Bubbles are beneficial because they provide domestic stores of value and thereby reduce capital outflows while increasing investment. But they come at a cost, as they expose the country to bubble-crashes and capital flow reversals. We show that domestic financial underdevelopment not only facilitates the emergence of bubbles, but also leads agents to undervalue the aggregate risk embodied in financial bubbles. In this context, even rational bubbles can be welfare reducing. We study a set of aggregate risk management policies to alleviate the bubble-risk. We show that liquidity requirements, sterilization of capital inflows and structural policies aimed at developing public debt markets ‘collateralized’ by future revenues, all have a high payoff in this environment.     

Assessing financial market integration in Asia – Equity markets

Financial integration has strong implications for financial stability. On the one hand, financial integration among economies helps to improve their capacity to absorb shocks and foster development. On the other hand, intensified financial linkages in a world of increasing capital mobility may also harbour the risk of cross-border financial contagion. This paper provides a survey of high-frequency indicators to monitor the development of equity market integration in Asia. The results show that after slowing down between 2002 and 2006, the equity market integration process picked up again in 2007–08. Nevertheless, the process is not complete and the degrees of integration between mature and emerging equity markets are different. The divergence may be attributed to the difference in the political, economic and institutional aspects across jurisdictions in Asia.     

Creative destruction and firm-specific performance heterogeneity

Traditional U.S. industries with higher firm-specific stock return and fundamentals performance heterogeneity use information technology (IT) more intensively and post faster productivity growth in the late 20th century. We argue that this mechanically reflects a wave of Schumpeter's creative destruction disrupting a wide swath of industries, with successful IT adopters unpredictably undermining established firms. This validates endogenous growth theory models of creative destruction and suggests intensified creative destruction as explaining findings associating greater firm-specific performance variation with higher per capita GDPs, economy growth rates, accounting standards, financial system development, and property right protection.     

The interest group theory of financial development: Evidence from regulation

We use a new dataset of de jure measures of trade, capital account, product market, and domestic financial regulation for 91 countries from 1973 to 2005 to test Rajan and Zingales’s (2003) interest group theory of financial development. In line with the theory, we find strong evidence that trade liberalization is a leading indicator of domestic financial liberalization. This result is robust to the use of different data frequencies (annual, 5-year intervals), estimation methods (OLS, 2SLS, system GMM) and a check for non-linear effects. However, in contrast to the theory, we do not find consistent evidence of an effect of capital account liberalization.     

The global financial crisis: Explaining cross-country differences in the output impact

What explains differences in the crisis impact across developing countries and emerging markets? Using cross-country regressions to assess the factors driving the growth performance in 2009 (compared to pre-crisis forecasts for that year), we find that a small set of variables explain a large share of the variation in the growth impact. Countries with more leveraged domestic financial systems, stronger credit growth, and more short-term debt tended to suffer a larger effect on economic activity, although the relative importance of these factors differs across country groups. For emerging markets, this financial channel trumps the trade channel. For a broader set of developing countries, however, the trade channel seems to have mattered, with more open countries affected more strongly and those exporting food commodities being less hard hit. Exchange-rate flexibility helped in buffering the impact of the shock, particularly for emerging markets. There is also some evidence that countries with a stronger fiscal position prior to the crisis were impacted less severely. We find little evidence for the importance of other policy variables.     

中国金融发展与服务贸易关系的实证研究:1982-2007

服务贸易正成为全球经济竞争的重点。本文分析了金融和贸易的相互影响机制,运用协整和格兰杰因果检验方法,研究了我国金融发展和服务贸易的关系,结论表明:二者间存在长期均衡的稳定关系,金融发展效率对服务贸易的发展起到了促进作用;仅服务贸易是金融发展的Granger原因。最后从金融支持产业结构升级的角度,提出金融发展促进服务贸易的政策建议。