Real and nominal shocks in a two-country price-setting world

This paper develops a two-country model in which the law of one price does not hold in the short run, and which is consistent with the stylized fact that exchange rates respond more quickly to ‘news’ than prices. This is done by assuming that firms face lumpy information costs in determining what price to charge. Both domestic and imported goods prices are therefore sticky with respect to ‘news’, and deviations from the law of one price (PPP) are due to exchange rate surprises. The model is used to analyze the domestic and international impact of real and nominal disturbances.     

The choice of exchange rate bands: balancing credibility and flexibility

This paper develops a framework for the optimal choice of exchange rate bands within an environment in which policymakers dislike nominal exchange rate variability, but value the flexibility to adjust the nominal exchange rate in response to shocks, in order to attain real exchange rate objectives. The paper provides an endogenous characterization of the optimal exchange rate band in terms of the underlying distribution of shocks to the current and capital accounts of the balance of payments and in terms of the commitment reputation of policymakers.     

人民币实际有效汇率与中国工业制成品对外贸易平衡的长期关系分析

以双边名义汇率为基础 ,对 1978～ 1999年期间人民币的名义和实际有效汇率指数进行测算 ,利用协整技术分析中国工业制成品对贸易平衡指标与我国实际国内生产总值、国外实际收入及人民币实际有效汇率之间存在长期稳定的均衡关系 ,实际的人民币贬值改善了我国工业制成品对外贸易平衡状况。     

Endogenous norms in wage and price setting and hysteresis in the real exchange rate

Real exchange rates are often ‘disconnected’ from fundamentals. Mean reversion toward equilibrium operates at a slow pace (if it operates at all), and when inflation is low the real exchange rate tracks closely the nominal exchange rate for prolonged periods of time. Using a simple open economy model, we show that including endogenous norms in wage and price setting in an open economy set‐up can lead to hysteresis in the real exchange rate. For a given set of fundamentals, the real exchange rate may settle down at different equilibria and exchange rate policies are not necessarily neutral in the long‐run.     

Dissecting the PPP puzzle: the unconventional roles of nominal exchange rate and price adjustments

The conventional view, as expounded by sticky-price models, is that price adjustment determines the PPP reversion rate. This study examines the mechanism by which PPP deviations are corrected. Nominal exchange rate adjustment, not price adjustment, is shown to be the key engine governing the speed of PPP convergence. Moreover, nominal exchange rates are found to converge much more slowly than prices. With the reversion being driven primarily by nominal exchange rates, real exchange rates also revert at a slower rate than prices, as identified by the PPP puzzle [J. Econ. Lit. 34 (1996) 647].     

Real and Nominal Effective Exchange Rates for LDCs: 1971–2004

International Monetary Fund constructs and publishes real and nominal effective exchange rates mostly for industrial countries. Recently it has begun publishing such data for some newly industrialized developing countries as well. There remains some developing countries that still have not received any attention by the IMF. This paper bridges that gap by constructing quarterly real and nominal effective exchange rates for 11 developing countries over the 1971–2004 period. As an application we try to assess whether nominal depreciation in these countries has led to real depreciation.     

An Empirical Analysis of the Determinants of Interest Rates in Ghana

ABSTRACT

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the determinants of the bank lending rate in Ghana using annual time series data from 1970 to 2013. We found evidence of a long-run equilibrium relationship between the average lending rate charged by commercial banks and its determining factors. In the long run, bank lending rates in Ghana are positively influenced by nominal exchange rates and Bank of Ghana’s monetary policy rate but negatively with fiscal deficit, real GDP and inflation. We also find positive dependence of the bank lending rate on exchange rates, and the monetary policy rate both in the short and long run. Specifically, our findings reveal that the Bank of Ghana’s monetary policy rate and the exchange rate, by far, show strong contemporaneous effects on the average bank lending rate in Ghana.     

Into the Mussa puzzle: monetary policy regimes and the real exchange rate in a small open economy

Industrial countries moving from fixed to floating exchange rate regimes experience dramatic rises in the variability of the real exchange rate. This evidence, forcefully documented by Mussa [Nominal exchange regimes and the behavior of real exchange rates: evidence and implications. Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 25 (1986) 117], is a puzzle because it is hard to reconcile with the assumption of flexible prices. This paper lays out a dynamic general equilibrium model of a small open economy that combines nominal price rigidity with a systematic behavior of monetary policy able to approximate a continuum of exchange rate regimes. A version of the model with complete exchange rate pass-through is broadly consistent with Mussa’s findings. Most importantly, this holds independently of the underlying source of fluctuations in the economy, stressing the role of the nominal exchange rate regime per se in affecting the variability of the real exchange rate. However, only a model featuring incomplete exchange rate pass-through can account for a broader range of exchange rate statistics. Finally there exist ranges of values for either the degree of openness or the elasticity of substitution between domestic and foreign goods for which the baseline model is also consistent with the empirical insensitivity of output volatility to the type of exchange rate regime, as documented by Baxter and Stockman [Journal of Monetary Economics 23 (1989) 377].     

Does Euro or Dollar Pegging Impact the Real Exchange Rate? The Case of Oil and Commodity Currencies

The aim of this paper is to investigate the equilibrium exchange rates for commodity and oil currencies as well as the discrepancies of their observed exchange rates to these equilibriums. To this end, first, we estimate a long‐term relationship between the real effective exchange rate and economic fundamentals, including the commodity terms of trade. The estimation relies on panel cointegration techniques and covers annual data from 1980 to 2007. Our results show that real exchange rates co‐move with commodity prices in the long run and respond to oil price somewhat less than to commodity prices. Second, we assess the degree of misalignment of these currencies, as the gap between their observed exchange rate and the estimated equilibrium exchange rate. We show that these misalignments are not significantly related to the exchange rate regimes adopted by the countries, either pegged or floating. However, for pegged currencies, the size of misalignments significantly depends on the anchor currency, either the euro or the dollar. A comparison of misalignments of pegged commodity and oil currencies across different periods confirms these results: during periods of dollar (euro) overvaluation, currencies pegged to the dollar (euro) tend to be overvalued; the reverse being true when the dollar (euro) is undervalued. Consequently, pegged currencies are often driven away from their equilibria by wild fluctuations in the key currencies, on which they are anchored.     

全球失衡背景下中国外部财富分析

外部财富动态为理解全球失衡及其治理问题提供了新标准和新视角。与我国的经常账户持续盈余相对应,我国外部财富由负转正,但是外部财富的价值效应为负。运用外部财富的一个分析框架,对我国外部财富价值效应影响因素的分析表明,我国外部头寸与人民币名义汇率和实际利率存在显著的相互关系,与人民币实际有效汇率和美元实际利率则没有显著的相互关系。外部财富动态分析对于我国内外平衡的宏观经济政策选择具有丰富的政策含义。     

Persistent real exchange rates

Three well known facts that characterize exchange rate data are: (a) the high correlation between bilateral nominal and real exchange rates; (b) the high degree of persistence in real exchange rate movements; and (c) the high volatility of real exchange rates. This paper attempts a joint, albeit partial, rationalization of these facts in an environment with no staggered contracts and where prices are preset for only one quarter. There are two key innovations in the paper. First, we augment a standard two-country open economy model with learning-by-doing in production at the firm level. This induces monopolistically competitive firms to endogeneize the productivity effect of their price setting behavior. Specifically, firms endogenously choose not to adjust prices by the full proportion of a positive monetary shock in order to take advantage of the productivity benefits of higher production. Second, we introduce habits in leisure. This makes the labor supply decision dynamic and adds an additional source of propagation. We show that the calibrated model can quantitatively reproduce significant fractions of the aforementioned facts. Moreover, as in the data, the model also produces a positive correlation between the terms of trade and the nominal exchange rate.     

Consumption and real exchange rates in professional forecasts

Standard models of international risk sharing with complete asset markets predict a positive association between relative consumption growth and real exchange-rate depreciations across countries. The striking lack of evidence for this link — the consumption/real-exchange-rate anomaly or Backus–Smith puzzle — has prompted research on risk-sharing indicators with incomplete asset markets. That research generally implies that the association holds in forecasts, rather than realizations. Using professional forecasts for 28 countries for 1990–2010 we find no such association, whether for floating nominal exchange rate regimes, fixed exchange rates, or common currencies, thus deepening the puzzle.     

Macroeconomic effect of capital controls as a safeguard against the capital inflow problem

Concerns that a rapid surge in capital inflow leads to loss of autonomy in macroeconomic policy, and that its reversal has significant negative effects on an economy, have motivated capital controls during the 1990s. Under a fixed exchange rate system without capital-account restrictions, a decrease in world nominal interest rates causes in a small open economy a deterioration in the current account, real exchange rate appreciation, and inflationary pressure, as pointed out by Calvo et al. (, ). This paper examines macroeconomic effects of capital-account restrictions as a policy response to the capital inflow problem under fixed exchange rates. Theoretical analysis shows that capital-account restrictions not only stem the capital inflow but also reverse the associated macroeconomic effects. The model implies that capital-account restrictions are effective measures against the capital inflow problem of emerging markets in the 1990s.     

Just How Undervalued is the Chinese Renminbi?

Given that the value of China's currency has been a hot topic recently, this paper explores the equilibrium levels of China's real and nominal exchange rates. Employing a Johansen cointegration framework, we focus on the behavioural equilibrium exchange rate (BEER) and permanent equilibrium exchange rate (PEER) models. Our results suggest that, while the renminbi is somewhat undervalued against the dollar, the misalignment is not nearly as exaggerated as many popular claims.     

Do fluctuations in crude oil prices have symmetric or asymmetric effects on the real exchange rate? Empirical evidence from Indonesia

Current research on the oil price impacts on exchange rates typically relies on the assumption that fluctuations in crude oil prices have symmetric impacts on a country's real exchange rate. Thus, the contribution of the paper is to use the non‐linear autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) method of Shin, Yu, and Greenwood‐Nimmo (2014) and examine whether crude oil prices are asymmetrically passed on to the real exchange rate in the case of Indonesia. We uncover that oil price changes indeed asymmetrically affect the Indonesian rupiah in both the long and short run; i.e., the movement in the Indonesian rupiah appears to be more responsive to rising oil prices than to declining oil prices.     

Monetary policy in developing countries: lessons from Kenya

We estimate and then simulate a model of Kenyan economic development from 1965 to 1997 with two objectives in mind. The first is to demonstrate the degree of volatility of cyclical shocks that developing countries experience and to calculate the domestic nominal adjustments required by these shocks under both irrevocably fixed and free exchange rates.A comparison of these counterfactual nominal adjustments identifies the short-run implications for an economy of the choice of exchange rate regime. The second objective is to provide an estimate of the consequences for the economic development of Kenya of the lack of a coherent monetary order (excessive domestic credit expansion and overvalued exchange rate) throughout most of the period since 1965.A neoclassical convergence growth model based on Barro and Sala-i-Martin (1992) is employed and calibrated to represent the long-run growth path of real GDP in Kenya. A short-run four-sector CGE model is constructed that allows for cyclical movements of real GDP about the convergence growth path. The cyclical model focuses on the adjustment of the relative price of non-traded goods that is required to ensure short-run equilibrium in the non-traded goods sector. Given that terms of trade shocks dominated the macro environment of Kenya over the sample period, we find that a free exchange rate regime would have insulated the economy to a greater degree than an irrevocably fixed regime. In the growth decomposition exercise, we estimate that the two largest (and negative) influences on Kenyan economic growth were the decline in the external terms of trade from 100 in 1965 to an average of 79.5 over the 32-year time period, and the overvalued Kenyan shilling represented by a premium on the parallel market for foreign exchange. Overall, we estimate that the overvalued exchange rate reduced economic growth by an average of 0.47 per cent per annum over the 32 years.     

基于VAR模型的人民币有效汇率就业效应

基于向量自回归模型,对人民币实际有效汇率的就业效应进行实证分析,结果表明就业量和人民币实际有效汇率之间存在长期均衡关系,长期而言人民币实际有效汇率上升1%就业量将下降0.1821%。因此,人民币实际有效汇率的波动率对就业量仅存在微弱的负面影响。     

Workers' remittances and Dutch Disease in Bangladesh

Workers' remittance is one of the major sources of foreign exchange earnings for Bangladesh in recent years. It accounted for 12% of GDP in 2009 and has colossal socio-economic implications for the country. However, the inflows of foreign exchange earnings can exert adverse effects on the international competitiveness of an economy as postulated by the Dutch Disease theory. Using Johansen Cointegration and Vector Error Correction Model and annual data from 1971 to 2008, this paper investigates the effects of remittances on the external trade competitiveness as measured by the movements of real exchange rate of the country. The results of the study suggest that the influx of workers' remittances significantly appreciates the real exchange rate and deteriorates the external trade competitiveness of Bangladesh. While increased terms of trade indicates similar adverse effects, openness in goods and capital markets and nominal devaluation improve the trade competitiveness of the country. Therefore, greater trade openness and channelling remittances to the priority investment projects can be powerful policy devices to improve the external competitiveness and avert ‘Dutch Disease' in Bangladesh.     

劳动密集型行业出口竞争力研究——基于行业实际汇率视角

利用2004～2007年的月度数据,首先算出劳动密集型行业实际汇率指数,然后实证检验影响该行业出口竞争力的核心因素.实际有效汇率升值,该行业实际汇率却全部贬值,行业实际汇率比实际有效汇率更能反映该行业稳步上升的出口竞争力.在此期间,劳动密集型行业出口竞争力的提升不是以牺牲利润率为代价获得的,行业实际汇率贬值对出口竞争力的提高起了重要作用,生产率的促进作用相对较小.     

Monetary policy and welfare in a small open economy

This paper analyzes optimal monetary policy in a small open economy featuring monopolistic competition and nominal rigidities. It shows that the utility-based loss function for this economy can be written as a quadratic expression of domestic inflation, output gap and real exchange rate. The presence of an internal monopolistic distortion and a terms of trade externality drives optimal policy away from domestic inflation targeting and affects the optimal level of exchange rate volatility. When domestic and foreign goods are close substitutes for each other, the optimal policy rule implies lower real exchange rate volatility than a domestic inflation targeting regime. The reverse is true when the elasticity of substitution between goods is low.