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Discussion Paper
Global Asset Prices and Taper Tantrum Revisited
Global asset market developments during the summer of 2013 have been attributed to changes in the outlook for U.S. monetary policy, starting with former Chairman Bernanke’s May 22 comments concerning future curtailing of the Federal Reserve’s asset purchase programs. A previous post found that the signal of a possible change in U.S. monetary policy coincided with an increase in global risk aversion which put downward pressure on global asset prices. This post revisits this episode by measuring the impact of changes in Fed’s expected policy rate path and in the economic outlook on the ...
Discussion Paper
How Easy Is It to Forecast Commodity Prices?
Over the last decade, unprecedented spikes and drops in commodity prices have been a recurrent source of concern to both policymakers and the general public. Given all the recent attention, have economists and analysts made any progress in their ability to predict movements in commodity prices? In this post, we find there is no easy answer. We consider different strategies to forecast near-term commodity price inflation, but find that no particular approach is systematically more accurate and robust. Additionally, the results warn against interpreting current forecasts of commodity prices ...
Discussion Paper
An Examination of U.S. Dollar Declines
Although the dollar strengthened somewhat recently, its level relative to the currencies of the United States’ main trading partners is nonetheless 11 percent lower than it was at the start of 2009. This represents one of the more pronounced periods of dollar weakness over the past two decades and consequently has garnered considerable attention from market participants and policymakers alike. In this post, we examine the role of market uncertainty and currency risk premia in the pace and size of episodes of dollar weakness since 1991. We find that the most recent bout of U.S. dollar ...
Discussion Paper
The Effect of Exchange Rate Shocks on Domestic Prices
Changes in exchange rates directly affect import prices. Since the beginning of 2014, the U.S. dollar has strengthened by 17 percent against the currencies of its major trading partners while import prices have fallen by 4 percent. The pass-through from exchange rates into import prices in the United States is estimated to be quite low, at around 30 percent, and this is often attributed to the fact that imports are mostly invoiced in U.S. dollars. In addition to this direct impact of exchange rates on import prices, there can also be an effect on domestic prices. Suppose that a stronger U.S. ...
Report
The emerging market economies in times of taper-talk and actual tapering
The emerging market economies (EME) experienced financial distress during two recent periods, both linked to the prospect of the Federal Reserve starting to slow its asset purchases. This policy change was expected to reverse the capital flows directed to the EME. Despite this aggregate effect, a closer analysis shows that there were significant differences across the EME during the time when talk of the upcoming taper began and the period when the policy was implemented. The author makes use of the literature on currency crises to analyze the different cross-country responses and to identify ...
Report
The effects of a stronger dollar on U.S. prices
Since 2014:Q3, the U.S. dollar has experienced the third-fastest appreciation in over 30 years, with its nominal exchange and real exchange rate rising 15 percent against almost all foreign currencies (as measured by the Major Currencies Dollar Index). This sudden and rapid gain has engendered concerns about how a stronger dollar will affect U.S. export and import prices and ultimately, consumer prices and inflation in the United States. This paper assembles a rich database, spanning the period from 1985:Q1 through 2014:Q4, that combines several measures of prices and exchange rates in order ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy Divergence and Net Capital Flows: Accounting for Endogenous Policy Responses
This paper measures the effect of monetary tightening in key advanced economies on net capital flows around the world. Measuring this effect is complicated by the fact that the domestic monetary policies of affected economies respond endogenously to the foreign tightening shock. Using a structural VAR framework with quarterly panel data we estimate the impulse responses of domestic policy variables and net capital flows to a foreign monetary tightening shock. We find that the endogenous response of domestic monetary policy depends on each economy's capital account openness and exchange rate ...
Report
Time variation in asset price responses to macro announcements
Although the effects of economic news announcements on asset prices are well established, these relationships are unlikely to be stable. This paper documents the time variation in the responses of yield curves and exchange rates using high-frequency data from January 2000 through August 2011. Significant time variation in news effects is present for those announcements that have the largest effects on asset prices. The time variation in effects is explained by economic conditions, including the level of policy rates at the time of the news release, and risk conditions: Government bond yields ...
Report
Gender differences in the labor market effects of the dollar
Although the dollar has been shown to influence the expected wages of workers, the analysis to date has focused on the male workforce. We show that exchange rate fluctuations also have important implications for women's wages. The dominant wage effects for women?like those for men?arise at times of job transition. Changes in the value of the dollar can cause the wage gap between women who change jobs and women who stay on in their jobs to expand or contract sharply, with the most pronounced effects occurring among the least educated women and women in highly competitive manufacturing ...
Report
Pass-through of exchange rates and import prices to domestic inflation in some industrialized economies
This paper examines the impact of exchange rates and import prices on the domestic producer price index and consumer price index in selected industrialized economies. The empirical model is a vector autoregression incorporating a distribution chain of pricing. When the model is estimated over the post-Bretton Woods era, impulse responses indicate that exchange rates have a modest effect on domestic price inflation while import prices have a stronger effect. Pass-through is larger in countries with a larger import share and more persistent exchange rates and import prices. Over 1996-98, these ...