A re-examination of the forward exchange rate unbiasedness hypothesis

A Re-Examination of the Forward Exchange Rate Unbiasedness Hypothesis. — This paper applies the Phillips and Hansen estimation and inference procedures to re-examine the hypothesis that the forward exchange rate is an unbiased predictor of the future spot exchange rate. The results indicate that the 90-day forward exchange rate is not an unbiased predictor. However, the 90-day forward and future spot exchange rates are cointegrated. Only for the U.K. pound/U.S. dollar exchange rate is there an error correction representation. Overall, however, the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that risk-averse agents in the forward foreign exchange market form expectations rationally.     

EXTREME VALUE AT RISK: A SCENARIO FOR RISK MANAGEMENT

This paper uses the generalised extreme value (GEV) distribution to model the extreme losses that are likely to occur during market crashes, in the case of an investor who has long positions in stocks and currencies. The null hypothesis – which tests for normality of asset returns – is rejected due to asymmetry of these returns. We assume that the asymmetric behaviour and volatility of the returns are captured by the shape and scale parameters, respectively, of a GEV distribution. The data set includes stock indices for the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and South Africa, and the South African rand exchange rates against the US dollar observed from 3 January 2005 to 30 December 2009. In addition, we divide this sample period into two periods: the pre‐crisis period, from 3 January 2005 to 31 December 2007 and the crisis period, from 1 January 2008 to 30 December 2009. We compared the estimates of value at risk (VaR) using an extreme value theory (EVT) model, with the estimates derived from the traditional variance–covariance method and found that during the crisis the 99% extreme VaR estimates are more reliable as they lie within the Basel II green zone. These results suggest that, at higher quintiles, the VaR estimates based on EVT are reliable and more accurate than estimates from the traditional method.     

Effects of hiring former employees of multinationals in the absorptive capacity of local firms

The attraction of foreign direct investment seeks, among other things, to increase the productivity of local companies through knowledge spillovers. However, the empirical evidence in this regard is contradictory. One influential factor is the absorptive capacity of the local companies. This article analyzes the effect of the presence of former employees of multinational corporations as employees of local companies, on the absorptive capacity of said companies. The study was done in Costa Rica, a country known for its successful strategy in the subject matter. The data come from a survey applied to 1167 companies by the Observatorio Costarricense de las Pymes in 2011. It was found that the hiring of former employees of multinational corporations by local companies has a positive effect on the index of absorptive capacity of companies in all productive sectors. Specifically, this hiring of former employees increases the index of absorptive capacity by nine percentage points, with differences by sector and the size of the company.     

Carry trade strategies based on option-implied information: Evidence from a cross-section of funding currencies

We document carry trade returns based on the moments extracted from options on the underlying currencies. We establish three important results. First, a currency pair is predicted to have greater excess returns if option-implied returns are more volatile, are more left-skewed, and have fatter tails than the returns of other currency pairs. Second, strategies based on option-implied information improve on benchmark strategies based on realized market returns and macroeconomic data. Third, if the option-implied returns of a currency pair are more left-skewed than in the past, anti-carry trades rather than carry trades perform better.     

FX Intervention in the New Keynesian Model

We develop an open-economy New Keynesian Model with foreign exchange (FX) intervention in the presence of a financial accelerator and shocks to risk appetite in international capital markets. We obtain closed-form solutions for optimal monetary and FX intervention policies assuming the central bank cannot commit to future policies, and we compare the solution to that under policy commitment. We show how FX intervention can help reduce the volatility of the exchange rate, of inflation, and of the output gap, thus mitigating welfare losses associated with shocks in the international capital markets. We also show that, when the financial accelerator is strong, there is a risk of indeterminacy (self-fulfilling currency and inflation movements) although FX intervention can reduce this risk and thus reinforce the credibility of the inflation targeting regime. Model simulations match well the impact of a VIX shock obtained by local projections on a panel of inflation targeting emerging markets.     

What is the major determinant of cross-border banking flows?

This study examines the major determinant of cross-border credit flows through global banks across 70 countries. Employing a Bayesian dynamic latent factor model, we decompose volatilities of banking flows into the contribution of a global common factor, regional common factor, and country-specific factor. The results indicate that the global and regional common factor explains about 40–50 percent of volatility in overall cross-border banking flows. In particular, the contribution of the global common factor increased in the 2000s. Simultaneously, main determinants are largely heterogeneous across countries: this implies that the desirable policy response to credit inflows may differ for each host country.     

Institutional Monitoring: Evidence from the F‐Score

The extant literature shows that institutional investors engage in corporate governance to enhance a firm's long‐term value. Measuring firm performance using the F‐Score, we examine the persistent monitoring role of institutional investors and identify the financial aspects of a firm that institutional monitoring improves. We find strong evidence that long‐term institutions with large shareholdings consistently improve a firm's F‐Score and that such activity occurs primarily through the enhancement of the firm's operating efficiency. Other institutions reduce a firm's F‐Score. Moreover, we find evidence that, while monitoring institutions improve a firm's financial health, transient (followed by non‐transient) institutions trade on this information.     

Public external debt,informality and production efficiency in developing countries

This paper proposes an alternative approach to investigate the non-linear effect of external debt on growth. In the theoretical part, we develop an endogenous growth model with formal and informal sectors to analyse the effect of the public external debt on the production efficiency. We show that an increase of the public external debt share increases the production efficiency through a positive externality effect. However, it generates an opposite effect via the reduction of the formal sector’s size in favour of a less efficient informal sector. The resultant effect becomes negative beyond an optimal level. Besides, we show that a large stock of public external debt reduces the production efficiency when it leads to a tight fiscal policy which reduces the formal sector size. Empirically, using a stochastic frontier technique with unobserved heterogeneity, for a panel of 27 developing countries for the period of 1970–2005, we confirm that the turning point associated to the effect of the share external public debt is apparent at 84%.     

Intellectual property rights, multinational firms and economic growth

This paper develops a model of North-South trade with multinational firms and economic growth in order to analyze formally the effects of stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) protection in developing countries. In the model, Northern firms invent new higher-quality products, multinational firms transfer manufacturing operations to the South and the Southern firms imitate products produced by multinational firms. It is shown that stronger IPR protection in the South (i.e., the adoption and implementation of the TRIPs agreement) leads to a permanent increase in the rate of technology transfer to the South within multinational firms, a permanent increase in R&D employment by Southern affiliates of Northern multinationals, a permanent decrease in the North-South wage gap, and a temporary increase in the Northern innovation rate.     

评《国际经济比较中量值统一的价值尺度——剖析联合国ICP方法的缺陷》一文需商榷或探讨之处

对《国际经济比较中量值统一的价值尺度——剖析联合国ICP方法的缺陷》一文中有关F法、GK法论述和推理的不妥之处作了评论,重点探讨了F法几何平均的意义及其可传递性的解决以及GK法的思想实质问题。此外,文章对丛文核心思想IVC法与ICP的GK法作了深入比较。