Sterilization of short-term capital inflows—through lower interest rates?

Reductions in international interest rates are a major cause of capital flows to emerging economies. Increases in domestic interest rates are a frequent policy response to the resulting price increases. This is often unsuccessful. The paper suggests a theoretical explanation based on distinctive features of emerging financial markets, including imperfect asset substitutability and imperfect capital mobility for some sectors of the economy. It concludes that the appropriate policy response to capital inflows may be lower interest rates.     

汇率决定理论的发展与前沿述评

汇率决定问题是国际金融领域的一个重要命题,其间得到不断地丰富和发展。本文对汇率决定理论的发展脉络、内容、前沿作系统性地概述,并作出精要地评判。文章指出汇率行为的复杂性将是汇率决定理论研究的一个方向,非线性分析工具将成为汇率行为研究的主要手段。     

Evidence on the existence of speculative bubbles in farmland prices

We conduct tests for the contribution of speculative bubbles to farmland prices. These tests are carried out under the hypothesis that farmland investors rationally form expectations. The outcome of tests reported here allows us to infer whether farmland prices are determined by market fundamentals-discounted returns from the highest economic land use-or whether rumors about farmland price movements are self-fulfilling. The tests are stationarity and cointegration tests relating farmland prices to rents. The tests are carried out using data from three farm production regions-the Corn Belt, the Northern Plains, and the Lake States. In each region, we find little evidence to reject the hypothesis that market fundamentals determine farmland prices.     

Fixed Exchange Rates and Disinflation in Emerging Markets: How Large Is the Effect?

We examine developing countries which have institutional quality ratings for the effects of exchange rate rigidity on inflation. The level of institutional development exerts no effect on the impact of currency regimes. However, the interaction of institutional quality and exchange rates has, in the most plausible specifications, a negative impact on inflation. This suggests that fixed exchange rates exert at most a contingent effect on inflation, and indicates that countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America contemplating currency pegs would be better off improving institutional quality prior to adopting the euro or dollar and expecting a large subsequent disinflationary effect. JEL no.  F31, O11     

International interest rates and US monetary policy announcements: Evidence from Hong Kong and Singapore

This paper investigates the responses of market interest rates to US monetary policy announcements for the US and two emerging economies, Hong Kong and Singapore which are similar on many respects but have experienced opposite exchange rate regimes in the last twenty years. Our results, based on market expectations extracted from federal fund futures rates, document that FOMC announcements significantly affect the term structure of interest rate in the US and both Asian countries. Further, international interest rate differentials around FOMC meeting dates tend to be negative for short maturities with the impact gradually dissipating as bond maturity increases. Finally, for the case of Singapore, we find that domestic interest rates react to both external and domestic monetary policy announcements with a magnitude that is larger over the full bond maturity spectrum for domestic announcements. These results are robust to time-varying futures risk premia and alternative measures of interest rates expectations.     

Asymmetric volatility in the foreign exchange markets

We examine the presence or absence of asymmetric volatility in the exchange rates of Australian dollar (AUD), Euro (EUR), British pound (GBP) and Japanese yen (JPY), all against US dollar. Our investigation is based on a variant of the heterogeneous autoregressive realized volatility model, using daily realized variance and return series from 1996 to 2004. We find that a depreciation against USD leads to significantly greater volatility than an appreciation for AUD and GBP, whereas the opposite is true for JPY. Relative to volatility on days following a positive one-standard-deviation return, volatility on days following a negative one-standard-deviation return is higher by 6.6% for AUD, 6.1% for GBP, and 21.2% for JPY. The realized volatility of EUR appears to be symmetric. These results are robust to the removal of jump component from realized volatility and the sub-samplings defined by structural-changes. The asymmetry in AUD, GBP and JPY appears to be embedded in the continuous component of realized volatility rather than the jump component.     

What do interest rates reveal about the functioning of real business cycle models?

This paper begins by documenting the extent to which the predictions of standard Real Business Cycle (RBC) models are incompatible with observed movements in real interest rates. The main finding of the paper is that extending the baseline model to include habit persistence in consumption and adjustment costs to capital significantly improves the model's empirical performance. In our evaluation of the model's performance, we take special care of estimating and testing predictions of the model using both moments drawn directly from the data and moments calculated after identifying shocks to the stochastic trend.     

Commodity currencies

This paper looks at real exchange rate behavior by focusing on three OECD economies (Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) where primary commodities constitute a significant share of their exports. For Australia and New Zealand especially, we find that the US dollar price of their commodity exports (generally exogenous to these small economies) has a strong and stable influence on their floating real rates, with the magnitude of the effects consistent with predictions of standard theoretical models. However, after controlling for commodity price shocks, there is still a purchasing power parity puzzle in the residual. The results here are relevant to developing commodity-exporting countries as they liberalize their capital markets and move towards floating exchange rates.     

Catching up: The role of demand, supply and regulated price effects on the real exchange rates of four accession countries

The main aim of this paper is to examine the exchange rate behaviour of a group of four transitional, EU accession countries, with a view to making policy recommendations regarding their full accession to the European Monetary Union. We employ a dynamic OLS panel estimator to investigate the relative importance of demand and supply influences on the exchange rates of these countries. Our analysis shows that both supply‐ and demand‐side effects are important for the accession countries, although their overall effect on inflation differentials and competitiveness seems to be small. An additional focus of the paper is the examination of the role that administrated, or regulated, prices and the productivity of the distribution sector play in the real exchange rate dynamics. Using a unique database we show that administrative prices have been a powerful force behind price and real exchange developments for our group of accession countries. The distribution sector is shown to have an independent effect on the internal price ratio over and above that generated by the Balassa–Samuelson effect.