Excess comovements between the euro/US dollar and pound sterling/US dollar exchange rates

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to discuss excess comovements of the euro/US dollar and pound sterling/US dollar exchange rates, i.e. we look for comovements of exchange rates which are stronger than implied by the fundamentals. The results of the empirical analysis provide evidence that excess comovements exist for the two exchange rates. A long-run analysis of correlations can verify that a link exists between the correlation dynamics of exchange rates, relative inflation rates, long-term interest rates, economic sentiments and money supply. We find that common movements of money supply, prices and economic sentiments each play a major role in comovements of the exchange rates. From the investigation of the two exchange rates, we conclude that macroeconomic fundamentals can account for the comovement but that common non-fundamental factors also have major significance for the exchange rates.     

International macroeconomic dynamics: A factor vector autoregressive approach

In this paper international comovements among a set of key real and nominal macroeconomic variables in the US, UK, Canada, Japan and the Euro area have been investigated for the 1980–2005 period, using a factor vector autoregressive approach. We present evidence that comovements in macroeconomic variables do not concern only real activity, but are an important feature also of stock market returns, inflation rates, interest rates and, to a smaller extent, monetary aggregates. Both common sources of shocks and similar transmission mechanisms explain international comovements, with the only exception of Japan, where the idiosyncratic features seem to dominate. Finally, concerning the origin of global shocks, evidence of both global supply-side and demand-side disturbances is found.     

Macroeconomic Synchronization Between G3 Countries

This paper studies the existence of a world business cycle by examining quarterly and annual comovements in production, prices and interest rates in the three main world economies: Germany, Japan and the US. In accordance with earlier studies, contemporaneous relationships clearly dominate short-term dynamics. The evidence indicates the existence of strong comovements in prices and long-term interest rates, and, to a lesser degree, in GDP and short-term interest rates. They are, however, rather unstable over time.     

RELATIONSHIPS AMONG STRATEGIC COMMODITIES AND WITH FINANCIAL VARIABLES: A NEW LOOK

We examine the comovements among the prices of four strategic commodities that have long, adequate daily series: oil, gold, silver, and copper as a group. We also explore their causal relationships with two commodity-relevant macrofinancial variables: interest and exchange rates as an expanded group to shed some light on the prediction behaviors of those individual commodity prices relative to the selected financial variables. In the expanded group, the selected interest rate can provide a transmission link between commodity prices and the dollar exchange rate. The results and their policy implications are discussed at length . ( JEL C51, E27, Q43)     

What can we tell about monetary policy synchronization and interdependence over the 2007–2009 global financial crisis?

We investigate the synchronization and nonlinear adjustment dynamics of short-term interest rates for France, the UK and the US using the bi-directional feedback measures proposed by Geweke (1982) and appropriate smooth transition error-correction models (STECM). We find evidence to support the increasing synchronization of these rates over the period 2005–2009 as well as of their lead–lag causal interactions. Moreover, short-term interest rates converge towards a common long-run equilibrium in a nonlinear manner and their time dynamics exhibit regime-switching behavior. As far as the underlying types of monetary policies conducted by the world’s leading central banks are concerned, our empirical evidence thus reveals strong interdependence, but only some degree of synchronization.     

Great ratios and Common Cycles: Do They Exist for the UK?

This paper investigates the dynamic interactions between postwar, quarterly UK consumption, investment and income within a VAR framework. Use is made of two developments which allow sets of restrictions to be tested and imposed, and which potentially make the VAR framework much more economically interpretable. One set is placed by neoclassical growth theory and involves the presence of common stochastic trends linking the secular movement of the series (i.e. the great ratios), while the other set is placed by notions of common, or more generally, codependent cycles which have their origin in ideas of comovements between growth rates. Evidence is found to support the existence of the great ratios for the UK, and evidence is also found of a codependent cycle of order one in the growth rates of consumption, investment and income, so that although the cycles are not exactly synchronized, the response of the three growth rates to a shock will be similar from two quarters after the shock has occurred. Moreover, it is lagged consumption shocks that are primarily driving the cycle.     

Nominal term structure and term premia: evidence from Chile

The downwards trend exhibited in Chile’s nominal term structure since 2003 has been a common pattern shared by other developed and developing economies. To understand the behaviour of the nominal yield curve in Chile, we rely on an affine dynamic term structure model which allows the term structure to decompose into the expected short-term interest rate (related to the monetary policy expectation) and the term premium. We show that most of the fall of long-term interest rates as well as its dynamics are related to the term premium rather than the expected short-term interest rate. Moreover, we find evidence that term premium is driven primarily by the US term premium and domestic nominal uncertainty derived from expected inflation.     

Aggregate Fluctuations with National and International Returns to Scale*

Cyclical movements in aggregate output, factor inputs, and productivity are all positively correlated across countries. This article proposes a model in which positive cross‐country correlations of these variables result from increasing returns to the world‐wide variety of intermediate goods even if technology shocks are purely country‐specific. The model also accounts for the observed positive relationship between bilateral trade volume and international comovements. Positive comovements can also arise with constant returns to variety, but only if technology shocks are themselves strongly correlated. The combination of constant returns and common shocks, however, tends to generate procyclical fluctuations of the trade balance.     

Modelling regime shift behaviour in Asian real interest rates

In this paper we investigate whether real interest rates for a number of Asian economies are constant but subject to occasional jumps using the Markov switching technique. We find evidence that all six rates under consideration have generally been stable, only shifting in response to either international or country-specific shocks.     

Volatility spillovers and the global financial cycle across economies: Evidence from a global semi-structural model

The paper provides some evidence on the relevance of global uncertainty and risk aversion and the lesser importance of US interest rates for the global financial and business cycles. As framework, we use a global semi-structural model augmented with financial and trade interlinkages. Financial interlinkages are modelled with proposed global uncertainty, global risk aversion and global financial cycle channels. Trade interlinkages are modelled with proposed value-chain trade equations. We find that global uncertainty and global risk aversion are, by far, the main volatility factors in all economies. Other volatility factors such as US interest rates, foreign interest rates and trade-related factors rarely explain shares of forecast error variance above one percent.     

A REVISIT OF INTERNATIONAL STOCK MARKET LINKAGES: NEW EVIDENCE FROM RANK TESTS FOR NONLINEAR COINTEGRATION

Based on a theory proposed for the possible link between financial market integration and nonlinear cointegration, this study reinvestigates international stock market linkages by performing both conventional linear cointegration tests and newly developed rank tests for nonlinear cointegration. The stock price indexes of Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States are used, with daily data spanning from 29 May 1992 to 10 April 2001. Much more evidence of market integration emerges from nonlinear than linear cointegration analysis, suggesting that comovements among various national stock markets may well take nonlinear forms. Our findings challenge the conclusion of market segmentation reached in some previous studies that only conducted linear cointegration analysis.     

Do downturns cause desperation? The effect of economic conditions on suicide rates in Canada

There is conflicting evidence concerning the impact of macroeconomic conditions on suicide rates. To help resolve this pertinent question, we present evidence using Canadian data. We estimate feasible generalized least squares models of annual gender-specific suicide rates in the working age population (aged 25–64) using data from each of the 10 Canadian provinces over the period 1982 to 2007. We allow for heteroscedasticity across provinces and first-order autocorrelation common to all provinces. We posit that suicide rates in this population are a function of macroeconomic conditions (current and lagged unemployment rates and real per capita GDP) and other determinants that might be correlated with macro conditions, such as physician supply. We find that different factors affect suicide rates across genders and that some of the results are sensitive to the specification of the model we use and the regressors included. Generally, economic conditions affect men more than women; suicide rates are counter-cyclical and a higher supply of psychiatrists in a province is correlated with lower suicide rates.     

Common dynamics of nonenergy commodity prices and their relation to uncertainty

The purpose of this article is to improve the empirical evidence on commodity prices in various dimensions. First, we attempt to identify the extent of comovements in 44 monthly nonenergy commodity price series in order to ascertain whether the increase in comovement is a recent term phenomenon. Second, we attempt to determine the role of uncertainty in determining comovements among nonenergy prices in the short run. We diagnose the overall comovement using a dynamic factor model estimated by principal components. A factor-augmented vector autoregressive approach is used to assess the relationship of fundamentals, financial and uncertainty variables with the comovement in commodity prices. We find a greater synchronization among raw materials since December 2003. Since that date, uncertainty has played an important role in determining short-run fluctuations in nonenergy raw material prices.     

Estimating money demand functions for South Asian countries

In this paper, we estimate a money demand function for a panel of five South Asian countries. We find that the money demand and its determinants, namely real income, real exchange rate and short-term domestic and foreign interest rates are cointegrated both for individual countries as well as for the panel, and panel long-run elasticities provide robust evidence of statistically significant relationships between money demand and its determinants. Our test for panel Granger causality suggests short-run causality running from all variables, except foreign interest rate, to money demand, and we find evidence that except for Nepal money demand functions are stable.      

A dynamic Nelson-Siegel yield curve model with Markov switching

This paper proposes a model to better capture persistent regime changes in the interest rates of the US term structure. While the previous literature on this matter proposes that regime changes in the term structure are due to persistent changes in the conditional mean and volatility of interest rates we find that changes in a single parameter that determines the factor loadings of the model better captures regime changes. We show that this model gives superior in-sample forecasting performance as compared to a baseline model and a volatility-switching model. In general, we find compelling evidence that the extracted factors from our term structure models are closely related with various economic variables. Furthermore, we investigate and find evidence that the effects of macroeconomic phenomena such as monetary policy, inflation expectations, and real economic activity differ according to the particular regime realized for the term structure. In particular, we identify the periods where monetary policy appears to have a greater effect on the yield curve, and the periods where inflation expectations seem to have a greater effect in yield determination. We also find convincing evidence of a relationship between the regimes estimated by the various switching models with economic activity and monetary policy.     

Return and volatility transmission between oil prices and oil-exporting and oil-importing countries

This paper provides further evidence of the comovements and dynamic volatility spillovers between stock markets and oil prices for a sample of five oil-importing countries (USA, Italy, Germany, Netherland and France) and four oil-exporting countries (United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela). We make use of a multivariate GJR-DCC-GARCH approach developed by Glosten et al. (1993). The results show that: i) dynamic correlations do not differ for oil-importing and oil-exporting economies; ii) cross-market comovements as measured by conditional correlation coefficients increase positively in response to significant aggregate demand (precautionary demand) and oil price shocks due to global business cycle fluctuations or world turmoil; iii) oil prices exhibit positive correlation with stock markets; and iv) oil assets are not a good ‘safe haven’ for protection against stock market losses during periods of turmoil.     

Have food and financial markets integrated?

This article analyses comovements and discusses possibly greater market integration between aggregate food commodity and stock prices in the period 1990 to 2012. Return correlations, price return distributions, cointegration and Granger-causalities are tested in subsamples on monthly FAO Food Price Index and MSCI World Stock Market Index. Empirical results suggest that while there is only weak indication of greater comovements concurrent with structural changes such as changed agricultural policies, new demand due to growth in emerging markets and energy mandates and the financialization of food markets since the early 2000s, they did start to increase substantially in particular during the financial stress of the Lehman crisis and the Great Recession. While structural changes may have amplified price linkages across markets, results do not suggest that they are the key factors for greater price comovements. Instead, the effects of the late-2000s recession as a time of great economic weakness and uncertainty may have changed concurrently the behaviour of both food and financial market participants, such that different market prices exhibit large comovements.     

Time–frequency relationship between US inflation and inflation uncertainty: evidence from historical data

We provide new evidence on the relationship between inflation and its uncertainty in the United States on an historical basis, covering the period from 1775 to 2014. First, we use a bounded approach for measuring inflation uncertainty, as proposed by Chan et al. (2013), and compare the results with the Stock and Watson (2007) and Chan (2015) methods. Second, we employ the wavelet methodology to analyze the comovements and causal effects between the two series. Our results provide evidence of a relationship between inflation and its uncertainty that varies across time and frequency. First, we show that in the medium and long runs, the Freidman–Ball hypothesis holds with a bounded measure of uncertainty, while if the Stock and Watson (2007) measure of uncertainty is used, the Cukierman–Meltzer reasoning prevails. Therefore, the findings are sensitive to the way inflation uncertainty is computed. Second, we discover mixed evidence about the inflation–uncertainty nexus in the short run, findings that explain the mixed results reported to date in the empirical literature.     

Causal Effect of Credit Guarantees for Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises: Evidence from Italy

We evaluate the effectiveness of a partial credit guarantee program, implemented in a large Italian region, that aimed to improve the access to credit of small and medium enterprises. Using unique microdata from a broad set of firms, we show that the policy increased the long-term loans for beneficiary firms, while the total volume of bank loans was unaffected. Furthermore, targeted firms benefited from a substantial decrease in interest rates. However, there is some evidence that firms are more likely to default as a consequence of the treatment. Conversely, the results do not point to any significant effect on investments.     

On the accuracy of Blue Chip forecasts of interest rates and country risk premiums

We examine the accuracy of Blue Chip forecasts of short- and long-term interest rates and country risk premiums for the Eurozone and six other industrial countries for 1999–2008. In so doing, we utilize comparable random walk forecasts as benchmarks. Consistent with the efficient market hypothesis, the long-term interest rate forecasts fail to outperform the random walk. Our findings on the accuracy of short-term interest rate forecasts are, however, mixed. Further results reveal that Blue Chip is more (less) accurate in predicting country risk premiums associated with short-term (long-term) interest rates. Such evidence is reasonable since the short-term country risk premiums contain only the perceived default risk, while the long-term risk premiums, in addition, can contain the perceived inflation and exchange rate differentials.