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Working Paper
Currency blocs in the 21st century
Based on a classification of countries and territories according to their regime and anchor currency choice, the study considers the two major currency blocs of the present world. A nested logit regression suggests that long-term structural economic variables determine a given country's currency bloc affiliation. The dollar bloc differs from the euro bloc in that there exists a group of countries that peg temporarily to the U.S. dollar without having close economic affinities with the bloc. The estimated parameters are consistent with an additive random utility model interpretation. A ...
Working Paper
What can EMU countries' sovereign bond spreads tell us about market perceptions of default probabilities during the recent financial crisis?
This paper presents a new approach to analysing recent movements of EMU sovereign bond spreads. Based on a GARCH-in-mean model originally used in the exchange rate target zone literature, spreads are decomposed into a risk premium, an expected loss component and a liquidity premium. Time-varying probabilities of default are derived. The results suggest that the rise in sovereign spreads during the recent financial crisis mainly reflects an increased expected loss component. In addition, the rescue of Bear Stearns in March 2008 seems to mark a change in market perceptions of sovereign bond ...
Working Paper
Equilibrium Real Exchange Rate Estimates Across Time and Space
Equilibrium real exchange rate and corresponding misalignment estimates differ tremendously depending on the panel estimation method used to derive them. Essentially, these methods differ in their treatment of the time-series (time) and the cross-section (space) variation in the panel. The study shows that conventional panel estimation methods (pooled OLS, fixed, random and between effects) can be interpreted as restricted versions of a correlated random effects (CRE) model. It formally derives the distortion that arises if these restrictions are violated and uses two empirical applications ...