Journal of International Money and Finance最新文献

Are nominal exchange rate variations linked to the central bank's balance sheet, in particular to remunerated domestic liabilities? We use two metrics of implied exchange rates based on central bank balance sheet data: one is a traditional metric that includes the monetary base, and the other adds remunerated domestic liabilities. We first estimate a VAR model to investigate the endogenous interactions between central bank balance sheet components for a set of seven Latin American countries for the 2006:01-2019:12 period. Then, we use a pairwise cointegration framework to compare these two metrics of implied exchange rate with the spot (observed) exchange rate. We find that the implied exchange rates and the spot exchange rate are cointegrated for most of the set of Latin American countries. We also find that for a subset of our sample, the spot exchange rate adjusts to the metric that adds remunerated domestic liabilities. We conclude that remunerated domestic liabilities matter for understanding exchange rate dynamics, and explore a simple theoretical setup to better understand the mechanism.

We investigate the effects of rising urban house prices on manufacturing firms’ decisions on outward foreign direct investment (outward FDI) in a home country. By utilizing the panel data of Chinese industrial enterprises in 2005–2013, our estimates suggest that, for every 210 manufacturing firms or 13 listed companies in China, one firm will forgo outward FDI when house prices double. As a result, there could have been 95 percent more manufacturing firms or 70 percent more listed firms conducting outward FDI if house prices remained unchanged during the study period. To address potential endogeneity issues, we exploit a fixed-effects instrumental variable model, a difference-in-differences strategy, and housing discontinuities at provincial borders among neighboring city/county pairs. To elucidate potential mechanisms, we employ the “Olley and Pakes” covariance to assess resource allocation efficiency and observe its negative correlation with house prices. Furthermore, we delve into the impact of house prices and resource allocation efficiency on TFP, and find that house prices and TFP are negatively correlated, while resource allocation efficiency and TFP are positively correlated. Finally, heterogeneity analyses reveal that rising house prices exert a stronger negative influence on outward FDI entry for firms that are less productive, larger, domestically-owned, more closely linked to the real estate industry, labor-intensive, and in industries with higher levels of outward FDI participation. These results underscore the fact that rising house prices could exacerbate resource misallocation, leading to a decline in enterprise TFP and subsequently reducing their outward FDI.

We introduce a novel measure that captures the beta deviation of individual firms from their industry peers within China's stock market. Our analysis reveals that stocks with greater beta deviation generate significantly higher future returns. This predictive power is unaffected by established return predictors and remains robust across alternative peer identification methods, beta estimation techniques, and subsample tests. Our findings suggest a behavioral interpretation, linking positive predictability to mispricing driven by investors' extrapolation biases. Overall, our research highlights the critical role of incorporating peer firms into asset pricing, particularly in emerging markets.

This study analyzes how exchange rates affect corporate investment by scrutinizing firms' global value chain (GVC) networks. A salient feature of our analysis is that we adopt novel GVC datasets and methodologies to construct upstream- and downstream-specific exchange rates. We couple these GVC-integrated real exchange rates with global firm-level data and document that unfavorable exchange rate movements hinder operating performance and, therefore, corporate investment, especially among financially constrained firms. We use two large currency shocks in Brazil and Sweden to provide causal evidence. The results highlight nonnegligible frictions of how GVC-integrated real exchange rates affect corporate investment.

We develop a Bayesian Structural VAR model to study the relationship between different energy shocks and inflation dynamics in Europe. Specifically, we model the endogenous transmission from shocks identified by the global market of crude oil and the European natural gas market to two target macroeconomic variables, i.e. inflation expectations and realized headline inflation rate. Our results demonstrate that, since the post-pandemic recovery, inflation in the Euro area is mostly driven by energy price shocks and aggregate supply factors. In particular, the high peaks of the Eurozone inflation are mostly associated with natural gas supply shocks.

We investigate the effect of trade liberalization on entrepreneurship. By using China’s World Trade Organization accession as an exogenous shock to conduct a difference-in-differences estimation, we find that trade liberalization has a sizeable positive effect on entrepreneurship. Our findings are robust to different specifications and endogeneity problems. We further discuss the plausible mechanisms driving our results: the trade induced competition, and input market channel. China’s WTO accession may lead to more entrepreneurship in areas with low levels of economic development, a high level of trust, and industries with a low level of external finance dependence.

We revisit the effects of globalisation over the past 50 years in a large sample of advanced and emerging countries. We use accessions to Globalisation Clubs (WTO, OECD, EU), financial liberalisation and an instrument for trade openness to study the trade-off between efficiency (proxied by real GDP per capita and TFP) and equity (proxied by the labour share of income and the Gini index of inequality). We find that (i) most of our episodes lead to an increase in trade openness (ii) the effects on GDP per capita are mostly positive with some interesting exceptions and (iii) there is little evidence that globalisation shocks lead to more inequality.

We find that the market dividend yield and earnings yield can positively predict future inflation internationally. The inflation predictability of price ratios could invert the standard asset pricing predictive results. For example, dividend yields do forecast real dividend growth but not nominal dividend growth. We extend the analysis to the earnings yield as a robust analysis and document a similar predictive pattern. Further term structure analysis suggests that the financial ratio variation decomposition also differs significantly in nominal and real terms. In nominal-term decomposition, discount rate news is found to be the primary contributor to variations in price ratios while in real-term decomposition, cash flow news plays a more significant role, with its importance increasing over longer investment horizons. Our study utilizes consistent inflation predictability evidence in advanced economies to re-evaluate the global relationship between price ratios and inflation. We confirm that inflation is an international state variable in post-1970s samples and that the correlation between inflation and price ratios can almost entirely be attributed to the relationship between expected inflation and future growth prospects. This finding offers an explanation for the previously puzzling correlation between the dividend-price ratio and future inflation.

Timely monitoring GDP-at-risk and tracing economic downside risk sources can help establish effective risk warning and prevention systems. This study constructs a probability distribution for China’s economic growth with skewness determined by a multidimensional predictor information set of macro fundamentals. Such a treatment allows us to identify changing drivers of economic downside risks during monitoring GDP-at-risk’s dynamic evolutionary path. We also employ a time-varying parameter vector autoregression model with random volatility to explore the heterogeneous impacts of different macroeconomic policy instruments on economic slowdowns. Our results provide empirical support for macroeconomic management and policy formulation in emerging markets. We reach three conclusions. First, the dynamics of GDP-at-risk exhibit significant event-driven characteristics, and economic downside risk increases significantly under the influence of extreme events. Moreover, the probability distribution of economic growth is asymmetric--as the downside risk of the economy increases, its upside potential increases disproportionately. Second, the time-varying risk trace of GDP-at-risk shows that the contribution of financial conditions and local government debt to economic downside risk declines. The importance of the risk-driving role of housing price growth gradually increases, suggesting that China’s property prices can provide more valuable early warning information about future growth risk, allowing time for precise preventive measures. Nevertheless, interest rates and inflation as risk divers have consistently minimal impacts. Third, the heterogeneity impulse response function of GDP-at-risk suggests that quantity-based monetary policy and fiscal policy can manage economic downside risks in the short run. In contrast, price-based monetary policy can curb economic overheating and reduce downside risks in the medium to long term. Therefore, the effect of price-based monetary policy is more sustainable in China.

We use a sample of 75 countries to conduct the first international study of national culture on bank financial structure similarity. We construct a novel and comprehensive measure of bank financial structure similarity using banks’ financial statement data. Our empirical results show that individualism is robustly and positively associated with bank financial structure similarity, holding bank-pair levels, bank levels, and country levels equal. We find that other cultural dimensions, such as power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and long-term orientation, have little effect on similarity. Our work also shows that financial structure similarity is correlated with higher bank risk.