Do Fundamentals Explain the Behaviour of the Swedish Real Effective Exchange Rate?

This study examines the long‐run relationship between the real effective exchange rate and its fundamental determinants, and derives a real effective equilibrium exchange rate for the Swedish krona. Our results indicate that the krona was severely overvalued in late 1992, when the fixed exchange rate regime was abandoned. By the end of 2000 the krona was undervalued by approximately 5 percent, given the prevailing economic conditions. Arithmetic examples of suitable SEK/EUR conversion rates are calculated under various assumptions to provide a guideline if Sweden were to adopt the euro in the future.     

Market microstructure in a global B2B network

On‐line marketplaces raise several interesting issues, among them the relevance of location when content is digitized, and the assessment of a supplier's capabilities when buyers worldwide only have electronic contact with sellers. In global B2B on‐line marketplaces, market microstructures, i.e. which firms compete for the same customers, are thus likely to be influenced by how customers value location and firm capabilities in their decisions to do business with different suppliers on‐line. We suggest that both these sets of attributes will continue to matter on‐line—firms possessing similar capabilities, as well as firms that are similar in location by country, time zones or clusters, will compete for business from the same customers. We model the similarity in competitive positions between pairs of firms based on the overlap in their customer networks, using data on actual interactions between supplier and customer banks on an electronic trading system. Using QAP network regression techniques on the 100 largest banks in this industry, we find that similarity in capabilities influences who competes with whom, and that location still matters in a global B2B exchange. Interestingly, location influences who a firm's competitors are, but not where its customers are from. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimum currency areas and the European experience

Across nations or regions, the debate on optimum exchange rate cum monetary policies is not yet resolved on three levels. First is the optimum domain of fixed exchange rates versus keeping them flexible. Second is the subordinate debate on whether one needs full monetary union (as in continental Europe) to secure an optimum currency area's internal domain; or, whether virtually fixed exchange rates — where national currencies remain in circulation — can be sufficient. Third is whether a regional grouping of economies with close trade ties (as in East Asia) gain by collectively pegging to an outside currency such as the US dollar. Using an axiomatic approach, which limits the set of cross‐country financial claims to what is feasible, I analyse how best to both share and reduce macroeconomic risks on these three levels. JEL classification: F31, F36.     

Inflation,interest and exchange rates in the transition1

Central and Eastern European economies have made extraordinary progress in their trade and exchange regimes. Surprisingly, instant convertibility was established for a great variety of exchange rate regimes. In spite of diversity, all these countries have followed a common pattern: severe initial undervaluation - the cost of speed and unrestricted trade - followed by rapid real revaluation and incipient protectionism. Since 1994 in many cases an embarrass de richesse has appeared: high capital inflows which are either inflationary or costly to sterilize. A major cause of these flows - or at any rate of the high cost of sterilization - is the presence of significant interest rate differentials higher than required to cover the risk of devaluation. These are the necessary consequence of a policy of positive real interest rates and of real revaluation from excessively undervalued exchange rates. Lower interest rates are recommended, both to stem financial capital inflows and to reduce the cost of their sterilization.     

Efficient Markets Hypothesis and the Emerging Capital Market in Sri Lanka: Evidence from the Colombo Stock Exchange – A Note

The behaviour of stock prices on the Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE) is examined with a view to determine its consistency with the weak form of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH). Runs, Autocorrelation and Cointegration tests are applied to daily, weekly and monthly CSE index data for the period of January 1991–November 1996. Results of Runs, Correlation and Cointegration tests overwhelmingly reject the serial independence hypothesis, leading to the conclusion that the behaviour of stock prices in the Colombo Stock Exchange is not consistent with the weak form of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. Tests of the-day-of-the-week-effect, however, show that there is no evidence of such a phenomenon on the Colombo Stock Exchange stock prices. Results of the tests of the-month-of-the-year-effect lead to the conclusion that CSE prices do not display any month-specific behaviour.     

Price Rigidity and the Selection of the Exchange Rate Regime

We evaluate and qualify Friedman's, 1953, “case for flexible exchange rates” in the presence of sticky prices in a two country model. We find that a flexible regime performs indeed better when the degree of nominal price rigidity is high while a bilateral peg does better when prices are fairly flexible. This result obtains independent of whether monetary policy is activistic or not and is mostly due to the negative relationship between employment and productivity shocks when prices are relatively sluggish (Gali, 1999). A unilateral peg tends to produce the lowest level of world welfare but it sometimes represents the best monetary arrangement for the pegger. JEL Classification Numbers: E32, E52, F33, F42     

On the forecastability of share prices on the Viennese stock exchange

In this paper the Viennese stock exchange data are analysed by using ARMA and GARCH technology. After using AIC and BIC for estimating the linear structure of the time series, to the resulting innovations a GARCH(1,1) model is fit. The resulting residuals are then tested for serial independence and constancy of its distribution to check whether the models are reasonable. Main result is that the residuals of this ARMA-GARCH(1,1)-model are reasonably iid (which is checked by BDS and classical independence tests) for index data and significantly less well-behaved for stock data. Second, there is considerable autocorrelation in the data (especially in the Viennese indices WBK and ATX) which can be exploited even with 1.25% transaction costs (which is checked by a posteriori analysis of a strategy which exploits an underlying time-varying AR(1) model), however, much higher profit can be made with 0.5% transaction costs. Furthermore, the same techniques are applied to US Standard & Poor 500 index and the results for both data sets are compared giving the result that the US-market looks much more mature than the Viennese one.Financial Support by the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, and the Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung, Vienna, Grant P 9176 is gratefully acknowledged. This paper is a slightly abbreviated version of the Research Report No. 135 by the same authors (see References), which contains many detailed plots of the results.     

项目总控的应用及其信息处理规划

随着国内大型建设项目的增多，大型建设项目的实施遇到诸多问题，其原因主要是业主对项目的控制能力不强，从而导致大型建设项目不能实现其质量、进度、投资等预期目标，甚至会导致整个项目的失败，项目总控模式的应用很大程度地解决了这一问题，另外，由于信息处理是项目总控的主要工作，因此，本也讨论了项目总控模式下的信息处理规划。     

本币升值对股市的影响——基于日本的经验研究

作为一国经济晴雨表的股票市场,不可避免地受到汇率变动的影响。文章以日本为例,分析本币升值对股市的影响。分析表明,本币升值在短期内推动本国股市繁荣,往往伴生股市泡沫,但继续升值预期一旦消失,股市往往出现大幅度下跌。因此,在人民币持续升值的背景下,必须根据我国的实际情况慎重考虑其对股市的影响。     

现代企业职业生涯管理的新视角——内部营销

文章在现有职业管理理论问题分析的基础上提出引入营销视角的必要性,并从营销的核心概念——交换和满足需求两个层面分析了营销式职业管理的可行性,最后对市场营销的方法体系在职业管理中的运用做了初步探讨。