Journal of International Money and Finance最新文献

Most countries in the world use foreign exchange intervention, but measuring the success of the policy is difficult. By using a narrative approach, I identify interventions when the central bank manages to influence the exchange rate based on pure luck. I separate them from interventions when the central bank actually impacted the exchange rate. Because intervention records are daily aggregates, an intervention might appear to have changed the direction of the exchange rate, when it is more likely to have been caused by market news. This analysis allows to have a better understanding of how successful central bank operations really are. I use new daily data on Bank of England interventions in the 1980 s and 1990 s. Some studies find that interventions work in up to 80 % of cases. Yet, by accounting for intraday market moving news, I find in adverse conditions, the Bank of England managed to influence the exchange rate only in 8 % of cases. I use natural language processing to confirm the validity of the narrative approach. Using lasso and a VAR analysis, I investigate what makes the Bank of England intervene. I find that only movement on the Deutschmark and not US dollar exchange rate made the Bank intervene. Also, I find that interest rate hikes were mostly a tool for currency management and accompanied by large reserve sales.

Hyperglobalization is dead, but globalization is very much alive. It is being reshaped by loosening economic and financial links between the United States and China. The extent of their decoupling should not be exaggerated, however. The two economies remain deeply interdependent, and their interdependence is being preserved by a re-routing of trade and investment through third countries. Similarly, it is important not to exaggerate the impact on the international role of the dollar, if for no other reason that for the time being there is no viable alternative.

This study examines the exchange rate implications of trend inflation within a two-country New Keynesian (NK) model. An NK Phillips curve generalized by trend inflation makes the inflation differential smoother, more persistent, and less sensitive to the real exchange rate. A Bayesian analysis with post-Bretton Woods data for Canada and the U.S. shows that the model's equilibrium, which relies on Taylor rules with a persistent trend inflation shock and strong policy inertia, mimics empirical regularities in exchange rates that are difficult to reconcile within a standard NK model. Trend inflation helps explain the empirical puzzles of the exchange rate dynamics.

A stylized fact of international capital markets is that advanced countries tend to be long and developing countries short in risky assets (i.e., portfolio equity and foreign direct investment (FDI)). In other words, residents of advanced countries hold a larger stock of portfolio equity abroad than residents of developing countries, and firms in advanced countries have more foreign subsidiaries than firms in developing countries. This paper is the first to utilize a large-scale international survey on economic preferences to propose a behavioral explanation for the heterogeneity in the asset composition of international investment positions. We provide robust empirical evidence that countries with a high time preference (i.e., patience) or a high risk preference (i.e., risk-taking) tend to have a positive net international investment position and a positive net risky position. In addition, we show that countries with a high degree of negative reciprocity (e.g., willingness to punish for unfair action) tend to have a positive net FDI position. Overall, our findings suggest that preferences are important determinants of cross-country variation in net foreign asset positions.

This paper studies the impact of global oil market shocks on the level, volatility, and correlation dynamics of real effective exchange rates over time. We find that the USD and the EURO act as shock absorbers, as shocks to the global oil market explain substantial proportions of the volatility and correlation dynamics of each exchange rate – compared to the small or even negligible contributions of exogenous interest rate and effective exchange rate shocks. Further we find an interesting “puzzle” that the Euro Area unexpectedly behaves as if it were an oil exporting country - the EURO appreciates in response to a flow demand shock that increases oil price. Our findings are garnered from a generalized time-varying SVAR model with stochastic volatility that allows for correlated disturbances between observation and transition equations and among transition equations themselves. This approach of enriching dynamics between the first and second moments of endogenous variables is particularly suitable for capturing the transmission of structural level oil shocks to the volatility of exchange rates and their correlation with the global oil market.

Using a panel of over 200 countries and 30 years of annual data since 1990, we find evidence of increasing durability in national monetary regimes. There are now three types of long-lived monetary systems. There have long been stable multilateral currency unions in the developing world, most notably in the Caribbean and both Western and Central Africa; the advent of EMU has (re-)introduced monetary union to the rich countries of Western Europe. A large number of mostly small countries continue to have durably fixed exchange rates. Most dramatically, inflation-targeting has emerged as a third stable monetary regime. We document the decline in monetary instability across countries and discuss some of the slowly evolving causes. Rising monetary stability and the spread of inflation targeting has had benign consequences for business cycles, inflation, real exchange rate volatility, openness, and the incidence of financial crises.

We begin by examining determinants of aggregate foreign exchange reserve holdings by central banks (size of issuing country’s economy and financial markets, ability of the currency to hold value, and inertia). But understanding the determination of reserve holdings probably requires going beyond the aggregate numbers, instead observing individual central bank behavior, including characteristics of the holding country (bilateral trade with the issuing country, bilateral currency peg, and proxies for bilateral exposure to sanctions), in addition to the characteristics of the reserve currency issuer. On a currency-by-currency basis, US dollar holdings are somewhat well explained by several issuer characteristics; but the other currencies are less successfully explained. It may be that the results from currency-by-currency estimation are impaired by insufficient sample size. This consideration offers a motivation for pooling the data across the major currencies and imposing the constraints that reserve holdings are determined in the same way for each currency. In this setting, most economic determinants enter with significance: economic size as measured by GDP, bilateral currency peg, and bilateral trade share. While one geopolitical factor (congruence in voting in the UN) is typically significant in the expected manner (with the exception of the US dollar), the other geopolitical factor (sanctions) does not enter with significance.

Global factors have traditionally determined capital flows, but domestic policies also matter. Developing countries face the challenge of managing procyclical capital inflows that can destabilize their macroeconomic environment. Inflation targeting can help solve this problem by enhancing the credibility and predictability of monetary policy. In this paper, we explore how inflation targeting affects the cyclical behavior of capital inflows in developing countries. First, we complement the data on international capital flows from the IMF with locational and consolidated banking statistics from the BIS. Second, we address the self-selection associated with inflation targeting by using entropy balancing. We find that inflation targeting reduces the procyclicality of capital inflows in developing countries. Specifically, inflation-targeting countries receive more (less) capital inflows during recessions (booms) than non-targeting countries. Other investment debt from the private sector mainly drives this effect. Our results are robust to various sensitivity checks and alternative specifications and methodologies.

This paper studies the impact of the Eurosystem’s low interest rate policy on euro area banks. We first assess the impact of low rates on banks’ net interest margins. An important extension to previous studies is that we split the interest margin into a funding and lending component. The decomposition makes clear that the low interest rate environment significantly reduced banks’ net interest income by squeezing funding margins, which corroborates the reversal rate literature. We find no strong evidence that banks have boosted their lending margins to offset the lost funding margin. However, we do observe that banks partly compensated for the impact of low rates by switching to non-interest income sources and by cost savings. We also find that low interest rates have not reduced bank lending, which suggests that banks’ compensatory measures largely outweighed the impact of low rates.

This study examines whether a country’s institutional quality can affect its output recovery after the recessions caused by financial crises. Utilizing a sample of 66 countries that experienced various financial crises during the period 1985–2010, we find that the quality of government institutions is negatively associated with the duration of recovery as well as the depth and severity of output losses during recessions. The results remained valid even after accounting for potential endogeneity. Moreover, institutional quality’s ability to improve output recovery is more pronounced for countries with the largest output losses, when coupled with an expansionary monetary policy, in emerging economies, during banking and sovereign debt crises, and in the 1990s.