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Working Paper
Globalization and inflation in Europe
What is the impact of import competition from other low-wage countries (LWCs) on inflationary pressure in Western Europe? This paper seeks to understand whether labor-intensive exports from emerging Europe, Asia, and other global regions have a uniform impact on producer prices in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. In a panel covering 110 (4-digit) NACE industries from 1995 to 2008, IV estimates predict that LWC import competition is associated with strong price effects. More specifically, when Chinese exporters capture 1 percent of European market share, producer prices ...
Working Paper
Exchange rate pass-through in a competitive model of pricing-to-market
This paper extends the Mussa and Rosen (1978) model of quality-pricing under perfect competition. Exporters sell goods of different qualities to consumers who have heterogeneous preferences for quality. Production is subject to decreasing returns to scale and, therefore, supply and the toughness of competition react to cost changes brought about by exchange rate fluctuations. First, we predict that exchange rate shocks are imperfectly passed through into prices. Second, prices of low quality goods are more sensitive to exchange rate shocks than prices of high quality goods. Third, in response ...
Journal Article
International liquidity provision during the financial crisis: a view from Switzerland
The authors document the provision of liquidity in Swiss francs (CHF) by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to banks located outside Switzerland during the recent financial crisis. What makes the Swiss case special is the size of this liquidity provision?at times, 80 percent of all short-term CHF liquidity provided by the SNB?and the measures adopted to distribute this liquidity. In addition to making CHF available to other central banks via swap facilities, the SNB also allows banks outside Switzerland to directly participate in its repurchase agreement transactions. Although this policy was ...
Working Paper
Market structure and exchange rate pass-through
In this paper, we examine the extent to which market structure and the way in which it affects pricing decisions of profit-maximizing firms can explain incomplete exchange rate pass-through. To this purpose, we evaluate how pass-through rates vary across trade partners and sectors depending on the mass and size distribution of firms affected by a particular exchange rate shock. In the first step of our analysis, we decompose bilateral exchange rate movements into broad US Dollar (USD) movements and trade-partner currency (TPC) movements. Using micro data on US import prices, we show that the ...
Working Paper
Export basket and the effects of exchange rates on exports–why Switzerland is special
Why has Swiss export performance been so strong during the past quarters despite the strong appreciation of the CHF? In this paper, we use historical data on exchange rates and trade at the sectoral level to document that a contributing factor behind the limited impact of the exchange rate is the unique composition of Swiss exports. In particular, we document that the Swiss export basket is heavily concentrated in price-insensitive goods such as machinery or pharmaceuticals, where prices and thus the exchange rate have relatively little importance for demand. This makes the aggregate volume ...
Working Paper
International liquidity provision during the financial crisis: a view from Switzerland
We document the provision of CHF liquidity by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to banks domiciled outside Switzerland during the recent financial crisis. What makes the Swiss case special is the size of this liquidity provision?making up 80 percent of all short term CHF liquidity provided by the SNB?and also the measures that were adopted to distribute this liquidity. In addition to making CHF available to other central banks via SWAP facilities, the SNB also allows banks domiciled outside Switzerland to directly participate in its REPO transactions. Although this policy was adopted for reasons ...
Working Paper
Trade linkages and the globalisation of inflation in Asia and the Pacific
Some observers argue that increased real integration has led to greater co-movement of prices internationally. We examine the evidence for cross-border price spillovers among economies participating in the pan-Asian cross-border production networks. Starting with country-level data, we find that both producer price and consumer price inflation rates move more closely together between those Asian economies that trade more with one another, ie that share a higher degree of trade intensity. Next, using a novel data set based on the World Input-Output Database (WIOD), we examine the importance of ...
Working Paper
Embedded Supervision: How to Build Regulation into Blockchain Finance
The spread of distributed ledger technology (DLT) in finance could help to improve the efficiency and quality of supervision. This paper makes the case for embedded supervision, i.e., a regulatory framework that provides for compliance in tokenized markets to be automatically monitored by reading the market?s ledger, thus reducing the need for firms to actively collect, verify and deliver data. After sketching out a design for such schemes, the paper explores the conditions under which distributed ledger data might be used to monitor compliance. To this end, a decentralized market is modelled ...
Working Paper
Exchange rate pass-through, domestic competition and inflation -- evidence from the 2005/08 revaluation of the Renminbi
How important is the effect of exchange rate fluctuations on the competitive environment faced by domestic firms and the prices they charge? To answer this question, this paper examines the 17 percent appreciation of the yuan against the U.S. dollar from 2005 to 2008. In a monthly panel covering 110 sectors, a 1 percent appreciation of the Yuan increases U.S. import prices by roughly 0.8 percent. It is then shown that import prices, in turn, pass through into producer prices at an average rate of roughly 0.7, implying that a 1 percent Yuan appreciation increases the average U.S. producer ...