International Finance最新文献

This paper examines estimates of, and drivers for, the sacrifice ratio, defined as the cumulative sum of foregone annualised output accruing from a disinflation of one percentage point. Three approaches are employed. The first reviews the literature on what sacrifice ratio might be expected. The second studies a generic disinflation experiment using 40 estimated macro models of the U.S. economy, calculating a distribution of sacrifice ratios. Those sacrifice ratios are high by historical standards and the paper discusses some stories for why this is so. The role of expectations formation and the credibility of policy is emphasised. The third approach investigates more closely some drivers of the output cost of disinflation by carrying out a selection of disinflation experiments using the FRB/US model, varying certain characteristics of the model's expectations formation mechanism. Pinning down a precise measure for the output cost of disinflation is challenging. However, the literature and policy experiments do offer some guidance on how the sacrifice ratio can be reduced.

This study employs the MS-GARCH-EVT-vine copula model to examine changes in the dependence structure and risk spillovers among global stock markets during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results indicate that the dependence structure of global stock markets exhibits intercontinental clustering characteristics. Specifically, the Hong Kong, French and US stock markets serve as the central nodes in the Asia-Pacific, European and American regions, respectively. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has reduced the number of stock markets directly linked to central nodes and exacerbated the synchronized decline in global stock markets. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased risk spillovers among global stock markets outside China, altering the direction of intercontinental risk contagion. These findings are significant for policy makers to prevent cross-border risk spillovers and for investors to enhance their risk management strategies.

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.