A century of purchasing power parity confirmed: The role of nonlinearity

Taylor (2002) claims that Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) has held over the 20th century based on strong evidence of stationary for century-long real exchange rates for 20 countries. Lopez et al. (2005), however, found much weaker evidence of PPP with alternative lag selection methods. We reevaluate Taylor’s claim by implementing a recently developed nonlinear unit root test by Park and Shintani (2005). We find strong evidence of nonlinear mean-reversion in real exchange rates that confirms Taylor’s claim. We also find a possible misspecification problem in using the ESTAR model that may not be detected with Taylor-approximation based tests.     

Nonlinear dynamics in exchange rate deviations from the monetary fundamentals: An empirical study

This paper reexamines empirical performance of the monetary exchange rate model with nonlinear dynamics of exchange rate deviation from the monetary fundamentals. First, we apply unit root test of Park and Shintani (2005) to post-Bretton Woods exchange rate data and able to reject the null of unit root deviation from monetary fundamentals against alternative hypothesis of nonlinear stationary process for deutschemark, pound, and Swiss franc. Our empirical results find that exchange rates show high degree of mean-reversion with larger deviation and long periods of overvaluation and undervaluation of dollar. We also find empirical evidence of predictability of the monetary fundamentals at longer horizons.     

Contributions to financial crisis research: an assessment of the literature in Social Science Citation Index journals from 1990 to 2008

Research in the field of financial crisis has generated a considerable amount of literature in the past, yet there has neither been any study to assess the contributions to the literature made by individuals or institutions, nor any to measure the impact of the articles and researchers. This study represents an attempt to: (1) investigate the major journals in publishing financial crisis research, (2) assess the contributions of individual researchers and institutions using the credited contribution approach and (3) measure the impact of individual publications and individual researchers on the financial crisis literature through citation analysis, based on the publications in Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) journals from 1990 to 2008. The findings provide a useful benchmark for assessing individual and institutional research productivity, and trends for future research and venues for publications are identified.     

Reflections on Economic Policy Making: 1945–51

Editorial Note:Mohammad Saubari was Secretary-General of the Department of Finance in the early 1950s. After his suspension from the civil service during the Guided Democracy years, he worked for several United Nations agencies in Indonesia. The following note, is based on his comments on the Indonesian translation of the interview with Professor Sumitro (Sumitro 1986), which were published in Kompas earlier this year, on his contribution to a commemorative volume published to honour Sjafruddin Prawiranegara in 1986, and on an interview which he gave to Anne Booth and Thee Kian-Wie in Jakarta in May 1987.     

Examining the evidence of purchasing power parity by recursive mean adjustment

This paper revisits the empirical evidence of purchasing power parity under the current float by recursive mean adjustment (RMA) proposed by So and Shin (1999). We first report superior power of the RMA-based unit root test in finite samples relative to the conventional augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF) test via Monte Carlo experiments for 16 linear and nonlinear autoregressive data generating processes. We find that the more powerful RMA-based unit root test rejects the null hypothesis of a unit root for 16 out of 20 current float real exchange rates relative to the US dollar, while the ADF test rejects only 5 at the 10% significance level. We also find that the computationally simple RMA-based asymptotic confidence interval can provide useful information regarding the half-life of the real exchange rate.     

Financing microfinance institutions: subsidies or deposit mobilisation

According to conventional wisdom, dependence on subsidies cannot achieve the double bottom lines of microfinance institutions (MFIs): outreach and financial sustainability. The application of market-based principles to microfinancing, such as deposit mobilisation, has been long suggested as an answer to this problem. This paper documents the following findings regarding this issue. First, deposit mobilisation crowds out subsidies. Second, subsidies and deposit mobilisation reduce microcredit interest rates and allow MFIs to reach poorer borrowers. Third, subsidies and deposit mobilisation worsen financial sustainability. Fourth, subsidies reduce repayment rates, while deposit mobilisation has no impact on repayment. Overall, the results suggest that neither subsidies nor deposit mobilisation solve the traditional problem of trade-off between outreach and financial sustainability.