International Finance最新文献

This paper investigates how the commitment to maintain an established inflation target as opposed to changing it depends on the extent to which institutional or economic preconditions improve in a country. For 19 inflation-targeting countries, we show that stronger operational commitment to the preannounced target is pronounced in countries with a greater improvement in institutional or economic preconditions, such as central bank independence, inflation, government indebtedness, financial development and central bank credibility. Our results also highlight the heterogeneous contingencies for the discretionary behaviour of adjusting the target, including the gradual disinflation phase, fiscal dominance and the transition to flexible targeting.

It is widely assumed that the renminbi (RMB) cannot acquire a meaningful place in central bank reserve portfolios without full liberalization of China's capital account. We argue that the RMB can in fact develop into an international reserve currency in the absence of capital-account convertibility. Trade and investment links can drive use despite limited access to Chinese financial markets. But this route to currency internationalization requires policy support. China must provide access to RMB through loans and the People's Bank of China (PBoC) currency swaps. It must ensure the convertibility of RMB into US dollars in offshore markets. It must provide RMB services at a stable and predictable price. Currency internationalization without full capital-account liberalization thus requires the RMB to be backed by dollar reserves, which the PBoC consequently will continue to hold and use. Hence, we do not foresee RMB internationalization as supplanting dollar dominance.

This paper investigates international monetary spillovers to stock prices in Bangladesh, a frontier market that has been excluded from prior studies in the literature. Using daily stock price data for over 300 publicly traded firms in a high-frequency event study framework, we find that contractionary monetary shocks originating from the US, euro area, and China lower stock prices, with Chinese monetary shocks having the largest impact. Contractionary shocks originating from India, on the other hand, lead to a statistically significant increase in stock returns. The positive response is driven by a small number of policy decisions. When these outlier decisions are removed from the sample, contractionary Indian monetary shocks lead to a decline in stock prices in line with spillovers from the other countries.

By constructing a novel index, the oil security attention index, this paper uses the  heterogeneous autoregressi (HAR)-type and its extended models to study whether oil security attention can predict oil volatility. Based on the definition of the different dimensions of oil security and three-pass regression filter (TPRF) dimension reduction technology, combined with Google search volume data of 23 keywords related to oil security, the oil security attention index is constructed. Considering the potential nonlinear relationship between attention and oil volatility, we incorporate asymmetric effects in the new extended HAR-type models. The research findings show that the oil security attention index we propose can capture the volatility of West Texas Intermediate. The out-of-sample results indicate that the extended models have better predictive power, which confirms the asymmetric relationship between oil security attention and oil volatility. In the robustness analysis, we compare TPRF with traditional principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least squares (PLS), and show that the oil security attention index constructed using TPRF has more favourable information than PCA and PLS to capture the oil security attention of the public.

We studied how the effect of global and domestic factors on capital flows towards emerging market economies has changed in the last 25 years. We find that both the global financial crisis and the so-called “taper tantrum” (TT) event, defined as the point in time when investors perceived the end of the US Federal Reserve's unconventional monetary policy, triggered changes in the sensitivity of capital inflows to their main drivers. In particular, we provide evidence that international investors devoted growing attention to global factors. Moreover, we show that the TT marked the beginning of a new phase, characterized by increased sensitivity to both global conditions and government borrowing by recipient countries.

This paper aims to determine the ‘new normal’ for banking stability in terms of capital adequacy, reviewing the incidence of banking stress episodes by lagged solvency ratios, based on the experience at the European level after the global financial crisis. We provide rating ladders for both risk-weighted solvency ratios and a simple gearing (leverage) ratio for time horizons of up to 3 years using well-known credit risk scoring procedures. Our findings empirically confirm that the recent dual metric structure of the capital adequacy framework is conducive to enhancing the accuracy of banking stability assessment. Specifically, our empirical analysis suggests that both tier 1 capital ratio and leverage ratio generally remain statistically significant in multivariate combinations for crisis probability measurement purposes. Robustness checks with well-established macrofinancial indicators as control variables suggest that this tandem is hardly replaceable in multivariate early warning systems by combinations of macroimbalance and financial soundness indicators traditionally employed as leading factors of banking crises. Moreover, the pandemic period provides meaningful evidence that robust capital positions, in line with our estimate, have so far been ‘part of the solution’ for dealing with systemic events.

This paper investigates the macroeconomic fundamentals that international investors consider crucial when assessing a country's default risk. Using panel data for 41 countries over the period 2002–2019, we find that the macroeconomic determinants of a sovereign credit default swap (CDS) are heterogeneous across developed and developing economies after controlling for potential endogeneity. While international investors consider government budget balance and inflation as crucial elements in the evaluation of the CDS of developed economies, more stress is placed on economic growth and foreign reserves in the assessment of the creditworthiness of developing economies. Furthermore, we document that better institutional quality reduces the sovereign default risk in both developed and developing economies. However, global shocks appear to have a strong impact in developing economies. The results remain robust to various specifications.