Integral stabilization policy and flexible exchange rates

Summary Under a floating exchange rate system, exchange rates influence economic activity through their effect on the trade balance. Nevertheless, exchange rate movementsper se do not prevent integral fiscal and monetary policies from achieving a target for domestic economic activity²⁴. At the same time, since the exchange rate continuously moves to preserve asset market equilibrium, the (potential) balance of payments may not be equilibrated when the authorities have attained their internal target. In that event, the continued movement in exchange rates may produce cycles in economic activity which in turn lead to exchange rate oscillations. Finally, the reader is warned that the introduction of inside and outside lags into the system may produce additional oscillatory behavior or even explosiveness, as Phillips demonstrated for the closed economy. However, these new possibilities would arise independently of the floating exchange rate system and could not be attributed to it.     

Some political economy of flexible exchange rates

This paper attempts to obtain estimates of the differences between long-run macroeconomic target states of political candidates or parties, as perceived by the market for foreign exchange. Such an approach supplements other work which derives policy targets from revealed preferences or from questionaires. The paper further employs the asset market model of exchange rate determination to derive typical time profiles of exchange rates around election dates, and confronts these patterns with reality. Finally, the paper addresses the question whether the foreign exchange market is semi-strong-form efficient with respect to political data.     

Stagflation and expansionary economic policies under flexible exchange rates

For a small Keynesian open economy with imported inputs and rational price expectations of workers it is shown that under flexible exchange rates expansionary domestic monetary or fiscal policy may cause stagflation. Simple conditions for such an outcome are given.     

Supply shocks and the interdependence of macroeconomic stability under flexible exchange rates

This paper analyzes the effects of a change in the monetary policy of a large economy on the macroeconomic stability of a small open economy with high dependence on imported intermediate goods. The analysis is carried out using the Taylor framework where the money supply rule is specified by the degree of monetary accommodation of price shocks. A supply shock to the large country is transmitted as both demand and supply shocks to the small country. A shift toward less monetary accommodation by the large country is shown to increase both price and output instability in the small country through the supply side linkage, while it may enhance price or output stability through the demand side linkage. Simulation results for Germany and Japan suggest that the supply side effect on price stability is important and that the effect on output stability depends crucially on the importance of trade in goods between the large country and the country in question.     

Conditions for short-run stability of a small open economy under flexible exchange rates

Short-run stability of a small open economy under flexible exchange rate regimes is shown to involve joint conditions on the rates of the growth of the public debt and of the current account surplus.     

On patterns of dynamic interdependence in a two-country world under flexible exchange rates

A two-country general equilibrium model of the world, where the interest-rate parity and the purchasing power parity conditions hold, is used to demonstrate how the two economies become interdependent through expectational mechanisms, and the government budgets being not in balance.     

On exchange rates and efficiency

Summary This paper analyzes an exchange economy in which several assets serve as stores of value and where agents have completely heterogeneous preferences and endowments. It describes the set of perfect foresight equilibria in which all assets have positive prices. There are international policies with determinate exchange rates if the world economy satisfies a strong efficiency criterion. Also, the corresponding equilibrium allocations are in the core of the world economy for certain international policies. Hence, a system of fixed exchange rates can support efficient allocations to the extent that countries agree on a division of seigniorage in the creation of international reserves.I would like to thank an annonymous referee, Suchan Chae, Mike Woodford, Ken Kasa, Helen Popper, Kathryn Marshall, and seminar participants at the University of Kansas, the Federal Reserve board, the 1990 meetings of the Western Economic Association, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Purdue University, and Victoria University of Wellington for comments on earlier drafts.     

Real exchange rates and competitiveness

This paper examines indicators of competitiveness. It analyses the conceptual foundations of conventional measures of the real exchange rate and finds that inferences about competitiveness from these indicators require strong, and in many cases implausible, assumptions. Based on this analysis some alternative measures are proposed and their use is illustrated using data from Europe. Given the usefulness of standardised indicators, four simple charts are proposed; these help solve some conundrums in the European data and provide the basis for a richer set of inferences about competitiveness.This paper has benefited from discussions with Bob Traa, from comments by Lars Svensson and many colleagues in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and from the analysis inMarston (1986). The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be construed as representing the position of the IMF.     

Interest rates,exchange rates,and aggregate supply

The paper discusses fiscal policy incorporating interest-rate and exchange-rate effects on aggregate supply. It is shown how the familiar aggregate supply-aggregate demand framework can be used in the presence of endogenously determined interest rates and exchange rates.     

Parity reversion persistence in real exchange rates: middle income country case

This article investigates purchasing power parity (PPP) in the specific context of middle income countries. To circumvent the low power of traditional stationarity tests (Augmented Dickey-Fuller and Phillips-Perron tests), it performs variance ratio and fractional integration tests in addition to Perron's test that accounts for potential structural changes in real exchange rate processes. Beyond estimating half-life shocks to PPP, this article attempts to explain these estimates using a set of country specific variables as suggested by economic theory. The evidence suggests that reversion to parity tends to be faster in high inflation countries and that productivity improvement leads to a higher level of persistence. Openness to trade tends to reduce the extent of deviations from parity but this result does not appear to be statistically robust. Evidence shows also that deviations are less persistent under a fixed exchange rate regime and under unrestricted capital mobility.     

Revisiting the relationship between exchange rates and fundamentals

In this paper, we apply the permanent–transitory decomposition method to analyze the role of permanent and transitory shocks in explaining the apparent weak link between nominal exchange rates and economic fundamentals. The results suggest that for most of the countries we investigate, including Finland, Italy, Portugal, France and Switzerland, transitory shocks dominate exchange rate fluctuations, while permanent shocks dominate the variations in economic fundamentals. The findings therefore provide an alternative interpretation of the “exchange rate disconnect puzzle”. Moreover, the results also suggest that comprehensive modeling of transitory components in empirical models should not be neglected in studies of the dynamics of exchange rates.     

Uncovering the link between a flexible exchange rate and fundamentals: the case of Central and Eastern European economies

This article examines the link between a nominal exchange rate and macrofundamentals in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. We use the model based on the monetary policy rule as a theoretical framework that explains the relations between the exchange rate and price level, risk premium, output gap, and expected inflation. It allows for endogeneity of the monetary policy – the issue ignored in the widely used monetary model. The sample covers the period January 2000 – December 2014, so the data are not plagued by high-inflation differentials characteristic for the early transition period and include countries with relatively flexible exchange rates. Our empirical strategy employs the panel error correction model that allows for cross-sectional dependence and a series of panel causality tests. The main finding is that the nominal exchange rates in CEE countries are not disconnected from macrofundamentals implied by the Taylor rule-based model. More specifically, we find that there is a strong cross-sectional dependence among CEE countries, exchange rates Granger-cause macrofundamentals and tend to revert to the long-run relation, and that the results are robust to the ‘extraordinary circumstances’ argument, i.e. do not rest on the dynamics during the global financial crisis.     

The relationship between exchange rates and interest rates in a small open emerging economy: The case of Romania

This paper revisits the relationship between interest rates and exchange rates in a small open emerging economy using wavelet-based methodologies. Based on data for Romania, our results confirm the theoretical predictions on the interest rate - exchange rate relationship during turmoil or policy changes. In the short term, the relationship is negative, confirming the sticky-price models, and over the long term, the relationship is positive, confirming the Purchasing Power Parity theory. At the beginning of the turmoil, the exchange rate movements generally take the lead over the interest rates for the first month, but the monetary authorities take the lead afterwards. Our results reveal that in a small open emerging economy with a direct inflation targeting monetary policy regime, the relationship between exchange rates and interest rate is fundamentally different from that in an advanced economy. Also, our results stress the necessity that the central bank must pay simultaneous attention to both variables in order to achieve their monetary policy targets.     

Bilateral real exchange rates and migration

Migrants who move across borders are, to a large extent, motivated by the prospect of earning higher incomes at destination, which can be partly transferred back to their countries of origin via remittances. This suggests that the real exchange rate can influence the incentives to migrate, as it determines the purchasing power of expected income in terms of the currency of the origin country. This article investigates empirically how bilateral real exchange rate fluctuations influence international migration flows. To do so, we build a dataset of 30 OECD destination countries and 165 origin countries over the period 1980–2011 and estimate an equation derived from a micro-founded random utility maximization model that allows for unobserved heterogeneity between migrants and non-migrants. Our results show that migration flows are highly responsive to bilateral real exchange rates: A 10% real appreciation of the currency of the destination country is associated with an 18.2–19.4% increase in migration flows.     

Interest expectations and exchange rates news

Using a new survey data set ofmatched exchange rate and interest rate expectations for eight currencies relative to the German mark, we examine empirically the relationship between exchange rate returns, news and risk premia. News on interest differentials enters significantly in equations for the difference between the spot rate and the lagged forward rate for the British pound, Japanese yen, Spanish peseta and the US dollar. An unexpected rise in the interest rate differential tends to strengthen the domestic exchange rate. For each of these currencies, we also find significant effects of our ex-ante measure of the risk premium. In addition, we investigate the effect of lagged interest rate differentials as proxy for the risk premium and find that they do not capture time-varying risk premia as is widely suggested in the literature, but probably capture a peso-problem, learning about a policy change, a market-inefficiency or a combination of these factors.     

Decomposing the persistence of real exchange rates

We propose a new methodology for decomposing the persistence of deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP). By directly comparing the impulse response function (IRF) of a vector autoregressive (VAR) model, where the real exchange rate is Granger caused by a set of candidate variables, with the IRF of the equivalent ARMA model for the real exchange rate, we capture the effects of the Granger-causing variables on the half-life of deviations from PPP. Our empirical results for a set of 20 industrial countries suggest that on average around 50% of the persistence of real exchange rates can be attributed to nominal interest rate differentials, inflation differentials and relative business cycle position with the numenaire country. Finally, we provide confidence intervals for the contributions of the aforementioned variables to the persistence of deviations from PPP by means of Monte Carlo simulations.     

Monetary policy, macroeconomic adjustment and currency speculation under floating exchange rates: the case of Bulgaria

This paper deals with the Bulgarian experience with exchange rate policy and the related macroeconomic adjustment in the transition period. It is argued that in the context of the Bulgarian macroeconomic environment, the exchange rate regime and the exchange rate policy (or the lack of such) did play a crucial role in determining the patterns of macroeconomic adjustment in this period. A simple general equilibrium model is suggested that provides some insights into the stylized performance of an economy under certain assumptions, similar to those characterizing the transitional state of the Bulgarian economy. Finally, some aspects of Bulgarian macroeconomic performance in recent years are analysed on the basis of the available empirical information and using the framework of the theoretical model. The paper concludes with the policy lessons of this experience.     

Reverse shooting of exchange rates

Reverse shooting of the exchange rate has been put forward in this paper by scrutinizing the adjustment and evolution of the exchange rate towards its new long-run equilibrium level following a change in money supply. Joint and sequential effects of covered interest rate parity and the sticky price on the rise, from the short-term through the long-run horizon, results in a feature of reverse shooting of the exchange rate. Regardless of what the immediate response of the exchange rate to the change in money supply can be argued for, reverse shooting homogenizes the evolution path of exchange rate adjustment and movement from different views.     

Home bias and the persistence of real exchange rates

This paper investigates the half-life of real exchange rates after taking into account the impact of home bias. Empirical results indicate that the half-life of real exchange rates is in the range of 1.5 to 2 years for four out of five countries after controlling the impact of home bias. These results support Obstfeld and Rogoff's (2000, NBER Macroeconomics Annual) view that home bias is crucial in explaining the PPP puzzle.