Real exchange rate dynamics: The role of elastic labor supply

Empirical evidence suggests that the flexibility of labor supply is closely related to the dynamic adjustment of the real exchange rate. This paper investigates this relationship in a two-sector dependent economy model. While, the long-run equilibrium real exchange rate is independent of the elasticity of labor supply, our analysis confirms that the nature of the labor supply can be a crucially important determinant of its short-run dynamics. The extent to which this is so depends to some degree on the source of the underlying structural change that is driving the dynamics of the real exchange rate. Numerical simulations confirm that this mechanism may help explain the larger short-run volatility and more rapid convergence typically associated with developing countries having less flexible labor markets.     

Home bias,exchange rate disconnect,and optimal exchange rate policy

This paper examines how much the central bank should adjust the interest rate in response to real exchange rate fluctuations. The paper first demonstrates, in a two-country Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model, that home bias in consumption is important to replicate the exchange rate volatility and exchange rate disconnect documented in the data. When home bias is high, the shock to Uncovered Interest rate Parity (UIP) can substantially drive up exchange rate volatility while leaving the volatility of real macroeconomic variables, such as GDP, almost untouched. The model predicts that the volatility of the real exchange rate relative to that of GDP increases with the extent of home bias. This relation is supported by the data. A second-order accurate solution method is employed to find the optimal operational monetary policy rule. Our model suggests that the monetary authority should not seek to vigorously stabilize exchange rate fluctuations. In particular, when the central bank does not take a strong stance against the inflation rate, exchange rate stabilization may induce substantial welfare loss. The model does not detect welfare gain from international monetary cooperation, which extends Obstfeld and Rogoff's [Obstfeld, M., Rogoff, K.,2002. Global implications of self-oriented national monetary rules, Quarterly Journal of Economics May, 503–535] findings to a DSGE model.     

Real exchange rate dynamics revisited: A case with financial market imperfections

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between real exchange rate dynamics and financial market imperfections. For this purpose, we first construct a New Open Economy Macroeconomics (NOEM) model that incorporates staggered loan contracts as a simple form of the financial market imperfections. Our model with such a financial market friction replicates persistent, volatile, and realistic hump-shaped responses of real exchange rates, which have been thought very difficult to materialize in standard NOEM models. Remarkably, these realistic responses can materialize even with both supply and demand shocks, such as cost-push, loan rate, and monetary policy shocks. This implies that the financial market development is a key element for understanding real exchange rate dynamics.     

Noise traders,exchange rate disconnect puzzle,and the Tobin tax

This paper proposes a framework to explain the “exchange rate disconnect puzzle”. Two types of foreign exchange traders, rational traders and noise traders are introduced into a sticky-price general-equilibrium model. The presence of noise traders creates deviations from the uncovered interest parity. Combined with local currency pricing and consumption-smoothing behavior, our model can help to explain the “disconnect puzzle”. The excess exchange rate volatility caused by noise traders can be reduced by the ‘Tobin tax’. However, the effect of the ‘Tobin tax’ depends on the market structure and the interaction between the Tobin tax and other trading costs.     

Real exchange rate, productivity and labor market frictions

We extend the classic Balassa-Samuelson model to an environment with search unemployment. We show that the classic Balassa-Samuelson model with the assumption of full employment emerges as a special case of our more generalized model. In our generalized model, the degree of labor market matching efficiency affects the strength of the structural relationship between the real exchange rate and sectoral productivity through influencing labor’s choice between employment and unemployment as well as movement across sectors. When the relative labor market matching friction is high, search unemployment is high and the standard Balassa-Samuelson effect may not hold. Empirical evidence supports our theory: controlling for differences in labor market frictions across countries provides a better fit in estimating the Balassa-Samuelson effect.     

Rational expectations,changing monetary policy rules,and real exchange rate dynamics

This paper reexamines the explanatory power of Taylor rule fundamentals for real exchange rate determination. We assume the agents know the time-varying parameters in central bank policy rules. The empirical results suggest that a monetary policy rule with regime switching is better able to explain the real Deutschemark/dollar exchange rate from 1976 to 1998 compared with a fixed-regime monetary policy rule. The findings show the importance of accounting for the expectation formation effect in changing policy rules as emphasized by the Lucas critique. Ignoring these effects can undermine the value of the rational expectations models.     

Real exchange rates and time-varying trade costs

This paper re-examines the empirical modeling of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) deviations in the presence of commodity market frictions. First, we show that a specific type of smooth transition models can closely approximate the functional form of the theoretical adjustment mechanism derived by Dumas (1992) [Dynamic Equilibrium and the Real Exchange Rate in a Spatially Separated World, Review of Financial Studies,5:2153-180] for the case of constant as well as changing trade costs. Second, we develop, for the first time, an empirical model of the real exchange rate which allows for changes in the degree of market integration. By employing a long span of data on the Dollar-Sterling real exchange rate and a micro-founded proxy for trade frictions, we provide novel evidence of a significant relationship between the persistence of the real exchange rate and the level of trade costs. This finding suggests that both the difficulty of detecting PPP and the extend of Rogoff’s puzzle vary over time with the degree of trade restrictiveness. Finally, we highlight policy repercussions of our results.     

Revisiting the consumption-real exchange rate anomaly in a model with non-traded goods

This paper shows that the assumption used in many two-country business cycle models that all non-traded goods are nondurable consumption goods magnifies the severity of the consumption-real exchange rate anomaly, which is the discrepancy between the high correlation between relative consumption and the real exchange rate predicted by most models and the low correlation observed empirically. This assumption hampers the ability to generate wealth effects necessary for the economies to deviate away from full risk-sharing. Using an alternative setup in which non-traded goods can also be investment goods improves the ability of the model to generate wealth effects, and therefore to overcome the anomaly.     

Nontraded goods, market segmentation, and exchange rates

Empirical evidence suggests that movements in international relative prices are large and persistent. Nontraded goods, both in the form of final consumption goods and as an input into the production of final tradable goods, are an important aspect driving international relative price movements. In this paper we show that nontraded goods play an important role in the context of an otherwise standard open-economy macromodel. Our quantitative study with nontraded goods generates implications along several dimensions that are more closely in line with the data relative to the model that abstracts from nontraded goods.     

Behind the scenes of abandoning a fixed exchange rate regime

This paper explores the process of abandoning a fixed exchange rate regime during sudden stops in a small open economy. The Bank of Korea’s exchange rate policy reports during the East Asian crisis suggest that its fixed exchange rate regime was forced to collapse due to the depletion of usable foreign reserves, which resulted from the credit policy of the Korean central bank to support domestic banks in need of foreign currency liquidity. To capture the Korean crisis experience, I build a quantitative small open economy model in which, in response to the country risk premium shock, the foreign-currency credit policy of a central bank under fixed regime leads to the exhaustion of international reserves and consequent exchange rate regime shift. This model does well at replicating the observed contraction in Korean aggregate variables.     

International financial integration and national price levels: The role of the exchange rate regime

This paper proposes a new perspective on systematic deviations from purchasing power parity. Panel evidence for OECD countries shows that international financial integration increases the national price level under managed exchange rate regimes and lowers the price level under floating exchange rates. An open economy sticky-price model reproduces these findings by relating them to the possibility of insurance against consumption losses in internationally integrated financial markets. The utilization of insurance is reflected by relative price adjustments which manifest themselves in changes of the national price level. The direction of relative price adjustments, however, depends on the extent to which insurance is used under different exchange rate regimes: under a peg, financial integration raises the national price level; under a float, however, financial integration lowers the national price level.     

Nominal exchange rate volatility,relative price volatility,and the real exchange rate

We model real exchange rate, nominal exchange rate, and relative price volatility using real and nominal factors. We analyze these volatility measures across developing and industrialized countries. We find that the inclusion of nominal factors achieves a sizable reduction in the real exchange rate volatility spread between developing and industrialized countries. In addition, we find that nominal factors matter to real exchange rate volatility in the short run and the long run, and that for developing countries, a higher share of real exchange rate volatility stems from relative price volatility.     

The size of banking crises in credible fixed exchange rate regimes

Since monetary policy is constrained in fixed exchange rate regimes, we should observe fewer banking crises due to moral hazard in countries with credible currency pegs. However, three countries with seemingly credible pegs in the nineteen-eighties and -nineties, namely China, Hong Kong and Argentina, still suffered crises in their domestic banking sectors. The present note illustrates that bank incentives to take on excess risk still exist in countries with currency peg credibility and that the size of that risk exposure (and thus the potential for crisis) may be positively related to the level of central bank foreign exchange reserves.     

Productivity, tradability, and the long-run price puzzle

Long-run cross-country price data exhibit a puzzle. Today, richer countries exhibit higher price levels than poorer countries, a stylized fact usually attributed to the Balassa-Samuelson (BS) effect. But looking back 50 years, this effect virtually disappears from the data. What is often assumed to be a universal property is actually quite specific to recent times, emerging a half century ago and growing steadily over time. What might potentially explain this historical pattern? We develop an updated BS model inspired by recent developments in trade theory, where a continuum of goods are differentiated by productivity, and where tradability is endogenously determined. Firms experiencing productivity gains are more likely to become tradable and crowd out firms not experiencing productivity gains. As a result the usual BS assumption—that productivity gains be concentrated in the traded goods sector—emerges endogenously, and the BS effect on relative price levels likewise evolves gradually over time.     

Flexible inflation targets,forex interventions and exchange rate volatility in emerging countries

Emerging economies with inflation targets (IT) face a dilemma between fulfilling the theoretical conditions of “strict IT”, which imply a fully flexible exchange rate, or applying a “flexible IT”, which entails a de facto managed-floating exchange rate with foreign exchange (forex) interventions to moderate exchange rate volatility. Using a panel data model for 37 countries we find that, although IT lead to higher exchange rate instability than alternative regimes, forex interventions in some IT countries have been more effective to lower volatility than in non-IT countries, which may justify the use of “flexible IT” by policymakers.     

Endogenous tradability and some macroeconomic implications

While nontraded goods play an important role in many open economy macroeconomic models, these models have difficulty explaining the low volatility in the relative price of nontraded goods. In contrast to macroeconomic convention, this paper argues that the share of nontraded goods is endogenous, a time-varying product of macroeconomic shocks and trade costs that are heterogeneous across goods. A simple open economy model demonstrates that trade cost heterogeneity and a time-varying margin of tradedness dramatically reduces the volatility of nontraded prices. This also reduces the ability of real exchange rate adjustments to dampen current account imbalances.     

Do central banks respond to exchange rate movements? A structural investigation

We estimate a small-scale, structural general equilibrium model of a small open economy using Bayesian methods. Our main focus is the conduct of monetary policy in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. We consider generic Taylor-type rules, where the monetary authority reacts in response to output, inflation, and exchange-rate movements. We perform posterior odds tests to investigate the hypothesis whether central banks do target exchange rates. The main result of this paper is that the central banks of Australia and New Zealand do not, whereas the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England do include the nominal exchange rate in its policy rule. This result is robust for various specification of the policy rule. We also find that terms-of-trade movements do not contribute significantly to domestic business cycles.     

Rational speculation and exchange rates

Models of exchange rates have typically failed to produce results consistent with the key fact that real and nominal exchange rates move in ways not closely connected to current (or past) macroeconomic variables. Models that rely on the same shocks to drive fluctuations in macroeconomic variables and exchange rates typically imply counterfactually-strong co-movements between them. We develop a model in which new information leads agents to change their rational beliefs about risk premia on foreign exchange markets. These changes in risk premia work through asset markets to cause real and nominal exchange rates to change without corresponding changes in GDP, productivity, money supplies, and other key macro variables.     

Designing targeting rules for international monetary policy cooperation

This study analyzes a two-country dynamic general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities, monopolistic competition and producer currency pricing. A quadratic approximation to the utility of the consumers is derived and assumed as the policy objective function of the policymakers.It is shown that only under special conditions there are no gains from cooperation and moreover that the paths of the exchange rate and prices in the constrained-efficient solution depend on the kind of disturbance that affects the economy. Despite this result, simple targeting rules that involve only targets for the growth of output and for both domestic GDP and CPI inflation rates can replicate the cooperative allocation.     

Should inflation-targeting central banks respond to exchange rate movements?

This paper examines whether it is optimal for inflation-targeting central banks to respond to exchange-rate movements. The paper finds that exchange-rate movements can provide a signal on the developments in the economy that the central bank cannot perfectly observe. The results suggest that when the degrees of exchange-rate pass-through and international financial integration are high, it is optimal for the central bank to pay more attentions to exchange-rate movements. These results however depend on two conditions: 1) the ability of the central bank to observe the true exchange-rate process and 2) the number of real frictions in the model economy.