Search Results
Working Paper
Foreign exchange predictability during the financial crisis: implications for carry trade profitability
In this paper, we study the effectiveness of carry trade strategies during and after the financial crisis using a flexible approach to modeling currency returns. We decompose the currency returns into multiplicative sign and absolute return components, which exhibit much greater predictability than raw returns. We allow the two components to respond to currency-specific risk factors and use the joint conditional distribution of these components to obtain forecasts of future carry trade returns. Our results suggest that the decomposition model produces higher forecast and directional accuracy ...
Working Paper
The role of jumps in volatility spillovers in foreign exchange markets: meteor shower and heat waves revisited
This paper extends the previous literature on geographic (heat waves) and intertemporal (meteor showers) foreign exchange volatility transmission to characterize the role of jumps and cross-rate propagation. We employ heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) models to capture the quasi-long-memory properties of volatility and the Shapley-Owen R2 measure to quantify the contributions of components. We conclude that meteor showers are more influential than heat waves, that jumps play a modest but significant role in volatility transmission and that significant, bidirectional cross-rate volatility ...
Working Paper
Global banks, financial shocks and international business cycles: evidence from an estimated model
This paper estimates a two-country model with a global bank, using U.S. and Euro area (EA) data, and Bayesian methods. The estimated model matches key U.S. and EA business cycle statistics. Empirically, a model version with a bank capital requirement outperforms a structure without such a constraint. A loan loss originating in one country triggers a global output reduction. Banking shocks matter more for EA macro variables than for U.S. real activity. During the Great Recession (2007?09), banking shocks accounted for about 20 percent of the fall in U.S. and EA GDP, and for more than half of ...
Working Paper
The real exchange rate in sticky price models: does investment matter?
This paper re-examines the ability of sticky-price models to generate volatile and persistent real exchange rates. We use a DSGE framework with pricing-to-market akin to those in Chari, et al. (2002) and Steinsson (2008) to illustrate the link between real exchange rate dynamics and what the model assumes about physical capital. We show that adding capital accumulation to the model facilitates consumption smoothing and significantly impedes the model's ability to generate volatile real exchange rates. Our analysis, therefore, caveats the results in Steinsson (2008) who shows how real shocks ...
Working Paper
Measuring the Effects of Dollar Appreciation on Asia: A Favar Approach
Exchange rate shocks have mixed effects on economic activity in both theory and empirical VAR models. In this paper, we extend the empirical literature by considering the implications of a positive shock to the U.S. dollar in a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) model for the U.S. and three large Asian economies: Korea, Japan and China. The FAVAR framework allows us to represent a country?s aggregate economic activity by a latent factor, generated from a broad set of underlying observable economic indicators. To control for global conditions, we also include in the FAVAR a ?global ...
Working Paper
International Transmission of Japanese Monetary Shocks Under Low and Negative Interest Rates: A Global Favar Approach
We examine the implications of Japanese monetary shocks under recent very low and sometimes negative interest rates to the Japanese economy as well as three of its major trading partners: Korea, China and the United States. We follow the literature in using movements in 2-year Japanese government bond rates as proxies for changes in monetary conditions in the neighborhood of the zero lower bound. We examine the implications of shocks to the 2-year rate in a series of factor-augmented vector autoregressive?or FAVAR?models, in which both local and global conditions are proxied by latent factors ...
Working Paper
Investment and trade patterns in a sticky-price, open-economy model
This paper develops a tractable two-country DSGE model with sticky prices la Calvo (1983) and local-currency pricing. We analyze the capital investment decision in the presence of adjustment costs of two types, the capital adjustment cost (CAC) specification and the investment adjustment cost (IAC) specification. We compare the investment and trade patterns with adjustment costs against those of a model without adjustment costs and with (quasi-) flexible prices. We show that having adjustment costs results into more volatile consumption and net exports, and less volatile investment. We ...
Working Paper
International Yield Spillovers
This paper investigates spillovers from foreign economies to the U.S. through changes in longterm Treasury yields. We document a decline in the contribution of U.S. domestic news to the variance of long-term Treasury yields and an increased importance of overnight yield changes—a rough proxy for the contribution of foreign shocks to U.S. yields—over the past decades. Using a model that identifies U.S., Euro area, and U.K. shocks that move global yields, we estimate that foreign (non-U.S.) shocks account for at least 20 percent of the daily variation in long-term U.S. yields in recent ...
Working Paper
Quantitative assessment of the role of incomplete asset markets on the dynamics of the real exchange rate
I develop a two-country New Keynesian model with capital accumulation and incomplete international asset markets that provides novel insights on the effect that imperfect international risk-sharing has on international business cycles and RER dynamics. I find that business cycles appear similar whether international asset markets are complete or not when driven by a combination of non-persistent monetary shocks and persistent productivity (TFP) shocks. In turn, international asset market incompleteness has sizeable effects if (persistent) investment-specific technology (IST) shocks are a main ...
Working Paper
Forecast Performance in Times of Terrorism
Governments, central banks and private companies make extensive use of expert and market-based forecasts in their decision-making processes. These forecasts can be affected by terrorism, a factor that should be considered by decision-makers. We focus on terrorism as a mostly endogenously driven form of political uncertainty and assess the forecasting performance of market-based and professional inflation and exchange rate forecasts in Israel. We show that expert forecasts are better than market-based forecasts, particularly during periods of terrorism. However, the performance of both ...