Discrete choice modeling with nonstationary panels applied to exchange rate regime choice

This paper develops a regression limit theory for discrete choice nonstationary panels with large cross section (N) and time series (T) dimensions. Some results emerging from this theory are directly applicable in the wider context of M-estimation. This includes an extension of work by Wooldridge [Wooldridge, J.M., 1994. Estimation and Inference for Dependent Processes. In: Engle, R.F., McFadden, D.L. (Eds.). Handbook of Econometrics, vol. 4, North-Holland, Amsterdam] on the limit theory of local extremum estimators to multi-indexed processes in nonlinear nonstationary panel data models.It is shown that the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator is consistent without an incidental parameters problem and has a limit theory with a fast rate of convergence N^1/2T^3/4 (in the stationary case, the rate is N^1/2T^1/2) for the regression coefficients and thresholds, and a normal limit distribution. In contrast, the limit distribution is known to be mixed normal in time series modeling, as shown in [Park, J.Y., Phillips, P.C.B., 2000, Nonstationary binary choice. Econometrica, 68, 1249–1280] (hereafter PP), and [Phillips, P.C.B., Jin, S., Hu, L., 2007. Nonstationary discrete choice: A corrigendum and addendum. Journal of Econometrics 141(2), 1115–1130] (hereafter, PJH).The approach is applied to exchange rate regime choice by monetary authorities, and we provide an analysis of the empirical phenomenon known as “fear of floating”.     

Impact of an unexplained component of real exchange rate volatility on FDI: Evidence from transition countries

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of an unexplained component of real exchange rate volatility on FDI in transition economies. We make an attempt to overcome some problems associated with previous studies; the aggregation problem, inadequate measures of volatility, short-run focus and the endogeneity problem. Using a GARCH specification, we focus on long-run volatility, while we control for the endogeneity problem by applying SYS-GMM estimation. The obtained results show that the impact of the unexplained component of real exchange rate volatility on FDI differs among economic activities since 2000. As part of the re-estimation exercise, we use two alternative measures of volatility to avoid arbitrariness. The obtained results are to a large extent in accordance with the first one.     

Measuring and modeling the effects of G-3 exchange rate fluctuations on small open economies: A natural experiment

I present evidence that exchange rate fluctuations among the world's major currencies significantly affect the business cycles of small open economies. The impact of those fluctuations on any given country depends crucially on its exchange rate regime. The three Baltic countries in Central Europe constitute an interesting natural experiment in that regard. I estimate a structural vector autoregression (VAR) model to show the differential impact of euro–dollar exchange rate fluctuations on the business cycles of these three countries. Next, I build a dynamic sticky-price model and I calibrate it to the Baltic States in order to match and explain the empirical evidence.     

企业防范汇率风险对策

随着社会主义市场经济体制的建立,企业经营自主权的扩大,企业所面临的各种风险相应增大。特别是国家对企业的外贸经营权的放开,对于外向型企业来说,有一个汇率风险问题。近年来国内外外汇市场波动剧烈,为了避免遭受不必要的损失,企业应采取积极的防范措施。本文旨在对影响汇率波动的主要因素、汇率风险在我国对外经贸活动中的表现及防范汇率风险的方法等问题,作一番简明的分析和总结。     

International foreign exchange agreements and nominal exchange rate volatility: a GARCH application

For eight major national currencies, this study estimates, and tests several hypotheses with, a t-distribution GARCH model of daily spot nominal exchange rate changes. The sample period covered is June 1, 1982 through September 30, 1992. By using likelihood ratio and parameter stability tests, it finds that for most of the currencies considered, both the conditional means and variances of unexpected exchange rate changes experienced statistically significant structural breaks across the five subperiods that are associated with four episodes of international foreign-exchange policy coordination. The study also finds that the orderings of the GARCH-estimated unconditional standard deviations roughly match the orderings of the sample standard deviations across the five subperiods. An explanation is provided for what underlying factors contributed to these structural shifts.     

Regime switching as a test for exchange rate bubbles

This paper develops a new test for speculative bubbles, which is applied to data for the Japanese yen, the German mark and the Canadian dollar exchange rates from 1977 to 1991. The test assumes that bubbles display a particular kind of regime-switching behaviour, which is shown to imply coefficient restrictions on a simple switching-regression model of exchange rate innovations. Test results are sensitive to the specification of exchange rate fundamentals and other factors. Evidence most consistent with the bubble hypothesis is found using an overshooting model of the Canadian dollar and a PPP model of the Japanese yen.     

人民币汇率:缓解升值压力,加快制度改革

近一段时间人民币汇率在内外因的共同作用下升值压力巨大,盯住美元的固定汇率制度已经不符合当前中国的经济形势,但是完全放开人民币汇率让其自由浮动在现有条件下也是行不通的,以市场供求为基础的有管理的浮动汇率制度才是目前的最佳选择。     

Technology and endowments as determinants of comparative advantage: Evidence from Mexico

We analyze whether the pattern of Mexico's comparative advantages in manufacturing trade flows, vis-à-vis its closest competitors, are related with productivity differentials (Ricardian hypothesis) or with differences in factor endowments (Heckscher–Ohlin hypothesis). The results suggest that Heckscher–Ohlin determinants tend to be more relevant than labor productivity differentials to explain the differences in the export patterns between Mexico and its competitors. This result holds even when we restrict the analysis to Mexico and other countries with relatively small differences in factor endowments, although in this case Ricardian comparative advantages gain some relevance.     

The exchange rate and macroeconomic determinants: Time-varying transitional dynamics

In this paper, I consider modeling the effects of the macroeconomic determinants on the nominal exchange rate to be channeled through the transition probabilities in a Markovian process. The model posits that the deviation of the exchange rate from its fundamental value alters the market's belief in the probability of the process staying in certain regime next period. This paper further takes into account the ARCH effects of the volatility of the exchange rate. Empirical results generally confirm that fundamentals can affect the evolution of the dynamics of the exchange rate in a nonlinear way through the transition probabilities. In addition, I find that the volatility of the exchange rate is associated with significant ARCH effects which are subject to regime changes.     

An objective function for simulation based inference on exchange rate data

The assessment of models of financial market behaviour requires evaluation tools. When complexity hinders a direct estimation approach, e.g., for agent based microsimulation models, simulation based estimators might provide an alternative. In order to apply such techniques, an objective function is required, which should be based on robust statistics of the time series under consideration. Based on the identification of robust statistics of foreign exchange rate time series in previous research, an objective function is derived. This function takes into account stylized facts about the unconditional distribution of exchange rate returns and properties of the conditional distribution, in particular, autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity and long memory. A bootstrap procedure is used to obtain an estimate of the variance-covariance matrix of the different moments included in the objective function, which is used as a base for the weighting matrix. Finally, the properties of the objective function are analyzed for two different agent based models of the foreign exchange market, a simple GARCH-model and a stochastic volatility model using the DM/US-$ exchange rate as a benchmark. It is also discussed how the results might be used for inference purposes. Research has been supported by the DFG grant WI 20024/2-1/2. We are indebted to two anonymous referees of this journal, Leigh Tesfatsion, Patrick Burns and other participants of the CEF’06 conference in Limassol for helpful comments on preliminary versions of this paper.     

Bayesian Model Averaging and exchange rate forecasts

Exchange rate forecasting is hard and the seminal result of Meese and Rogoff [Meese, R., Rogoff, K., 1983. Empirical exchange rate models of the seventies: Do they fit out of sample? Journal of International Economics 14, 3–24] that the exchange rate is well approximated by a driftless random walk, at least for prediction purposes, still stands despite much effort at constructing other forecasting models. However, in several other macro and financial forecasting applications, researchers in recent years have considered methods for forecasting that effectively combine the information in a large number of time series. In this paper, I apply one such method for pooling forecasts from several different models, Bayesian Model Averaging, to the problem of pseudo out-of-sample exchange rate predictions. For most currency–horizon pairs, the Bayesian Model Averaging forecasts using a sufficiently high degree of shrinkage, give slightly smaller out-of-sample mean square prediction error than the random walk benchmark. The forecasts generated by this model averaging methodology are however very close to, but not identical to, those from the random walk forecast.     

The relative size of exchange rate and interest rate responses to news: An empirical investigation

This paper examines the relative size of the effects of macroeconomic news on the spot exchange rate, and interest rate differentials (2- and 5-year swap rate differentials), and the synthetic forward exchange rate schedule, for the high-frequency New Zealand data. We find that the spot exchange rate and 5-year swap rates respond by a similar magnitude to monetary surprises, implying there is little response of the forward exchange rate to this type of news. In contrast, the spot exchange rate responds by nearly three times as much as 5-year interest rates to CPI and GDP surprises, implying that forward rates appreciate to higher than expected CPI or GDP news. This is in contrast to standard theoretical models and US evidence. Lastly, we show that exchange rates but not interest rates respond to current account news. The implications of these results for monetary policy are considered.     

Exchange rate volatility and domestic consumption: Evidence from Japan

In 1952, Alexander provided an argument that since inflationary effects of depreciation could shift income from workers to producers it could lead to a decline in aggregate domestic consumption. This was based on the assumption that wages do not adjust fully to inflation and labor has a high MPC relative to that of the producers. In this paper, we argue that in addition to the exchange rate itself, exchange rate uncertainty could also affect domestic consumption. We demonstrate our conjecture by using quarterly data from Japan and a bounds testing approach that distinguishes the short run from the long run.     

中国能源消费与经济增长关系研究——基于误差修正模型

在经济发展过程中,中国能源消费与经济增长之间表现出紧密的联系。笔者利用误差修正模型分析了中国1952～2008年能源消费与国内生产总值的数据,以此探寻能源消费与经济增长之间的相互关系,得出最终结论:中国的能源消费与经济增长在长期内保持均衡状态且两者互为因果关系。     

From inflation to exchange rate targeting: Estimating the stabilization effects for a small open economy

This paper attempts to estimate possible losses in macroeconomic stabilization due to a move from inflation to exchange rate targeting on the example of the Czech Republic. The authors use an estimated New Keynesian policy model, typical inflation and exchange rate targeting rules, and representative central bank loss functions to carry out these estimations. The authors find that for the Czech Republic, moving from the historically applied inflation targeting to optimized exchange rate targeting should not involve any significant losses in macroeconomic stabilization. However, the Czech National Bank could improve its stabilization outcomes while remaining an inflation targeter. This requires the Czech National Bank to respond more strongly to increasing expected future inflation and to be less concerned about an opening output gap when adjusting its policy rate. Moving then from such optimized inflation targeting to optimized exchange rate targeting can result in significant losses in economic stabilization in the magnitude of 0.4–2% points of GDP growth.     

The political economy of exchange rate regime determination: Theory and evidence

This paper studies exchange rate regime choice from a positive perspective by modeling the interplay of monetary and fiscal policy, credibility and financial market microstructure as factors influencing the decision on de facto regime. The model shows how a small open economy reliant on foreign sources of financing is likely to opt for a stable regime. Furthermore, a stable political environment with a high degree of accountability is conducive to choosing a flexible regime. The findings suggest that flexible rather than fixed exchange rate regimes provide more fiscal discipline.     

The limiting distribution of extremal exchange rate returns

Several nonnested fat-tailed distributions have been advocated for modelling exchange rate returns. Instead of directly estimating these nonnested distributions we investigate the extremal distribution of the returns. The advantage is that the parameter which characterizes the amount of tail fatness can be estimated without maintaining a specific distribution, and hence enables one to test hypotheses. The parameter of the limit law is estimated by employing nonparametric procedures based on order statistics. The appropriateness of these procedures is assessed. Given this estimate one can derive bounds on the returns for very low probabilities on an excess. Such information is useful in evaluating the volatility of exchange rates.     

人民币汇率政策的分析探讨

近年来,在亚洲金融危机以后,人民币汇率政策成为国际舆论高度观注的焦点问题之一,各方观点的争论此起彼伏,从未停息。尤其是在近阶段,中国GDP、对外贸易和吸引外资都保持了强劲的发展势头,同时IMF的估算显示,2002年人民币相对于其他主要贸易伙伴的名义有效汇率下降了6％,此种背景下,各国专家、学者和政要对当前的人民币政策众说纷纭,中国的货币当局面临着相当复杂的国内国际政策环境。     

Analysis on the exchange rate of Australian dollar

Australian dollar （AUD） maintains a fluctuant increase for long period, but in recent two years, this currency represents an anomalistic change. In order to forecast the trend of AUD, this essay examines the exchange rate of AUD in then years from March of 2000 to March of 2010, and argues the factors which create these trend changes. By means of secondary research and graphs analysis, the relevant evidence and argument was selected into four terms below： relative raw materials prices changes, relative domestic price level and Import-Expert changes, relative interest rate changes, and other factors. The examples based on the theoretics, graphs, statistics and experts＇ opinions.     

A forward looking model of the exchange rate

This paper outlines a simple framework for testing some of the underlying concepts which form the basis of a number of recent models of exchange rate determination. It estimates a structural exchange rate equation with explicit forward expectations using the Wickens errors-in-variables method. The paper finds a strong rejection of the simple open arbitrage model in favour of a more complex model.