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5031. Monetary Union, Price Level Convergence, and Inflation: How Close is Europe to the United States?

Author:
John H. Rogers
Publication Date:
10-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
In light of 50 years of economic policies designed to integrate Europe -- culminating in the elimination of euro zone national currencies in early 2002 -- and a vast academic literature on international economic integration, it is of interest to assess how far European integration has come in practice. Using a unique data set, I document the pattern of price dispersion across European and U.S. cities from 1990 to 2001. I find a striking decline in dispersion for traded goods prices in Europe, most of which took place between 1991 and 1994. The level of traded goods price dispersion in the euro area is now quite close to that of the United States. A decline in dispersion of non-tradeables prices in Europe has also taken place, but to a smaller extent. For U.S. cities, there is no evidence of a decline in price dispersion, even for tradeables. I examine several possible explanations for the decline in European price dispersion, including harmonization of tax rates, convergence of incomes and labor costs, liberalization of trade and factor markets, and increased coherence of monetary policy. I also investigate how much of the variation in national inflation rates in Europe can be explained by price level convergence. Finally, after showing that prices in likely next-round entrants into the euro zone are well below prices in Western Europe, I discuss the potential inflationary consequences of accession into monetary union for Eastern Europe.
Topic:
Economics and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States and Europe

5032. Identifying the Effects of Monetary Policy Shocks on Exchange Rates Using High Frequency Data

Author:
John H. Rogers, Jonathan H. Wright, Jon Faust, and Eric Swanson
Publication Date:
10-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
This paper proposes a new approach to identifying the effects of monetary policy shocks in an international vector autoregression. Using high-frequency data on the prices of Fed Funds futures contracts, we measure the impact of the surprise component of the FOMC-day Federal Reserve policy decision on financial variables, such as the exchange rate and the foreign interest rate. We show how this information can be used to achieve identification without having to make the usual strong assumption of a recursive ordering.
Topic:
Economics, Emerging Markets, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States

5033. Exchange Rate Regimes and Financial Dollarization: Does Flexibility Reduce Bank Currency Mismatches?

Author:
Carlos Ó. Arteta
Publication Date:
09-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
The dollarization of bank deposits and credit is widespread in developing countries, resulting in varying degrees of currency mismatches in domestic financial intermediation, which in turn might accentuate bank balance sheet fragility. It is widely argued that flexible exchange rate regimes encourage banks to match dollar-denominated liabilities with a corresponding amount of dollar-denominated assets, ameliorating currency mismatches. Does the behavior of dollar deposits and credit in financially dollarized economies support that presumption? A new database on deposit and credit dollarization in developing and transition countries is assembled and used to address this question. Empirical results suggest that, if anything, floating regimes seem to exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, currency mismatches in domestic financial intermediation, as those regimes seem to encourage deposit dollarization more strongly than they encourage matching via credit dollarization.
Topic:
International Relations, Economics, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States

5034. Are Depreciations as Contractionary as Devaluations? A Comparison of Selected Emerging and Industrial Economies

Author:
Steven B. Kamin, Shaghil Ahmed, Christopher J. Gust, and Jonathan Huntley
Publication Date:
09-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
According to conventional models, flexible exchange rates play an equilibrating role in open economies, depreciating in response to adverse shocks, boosting net exports, and stimulating aggregate demand. However, critics argue that, at least in developing countries, devaluations are more contractionary and more inflationary than conventional theories would predict. Yet, it is not clear whether devaluations per se have led to adverse outcomes, or rather the disruptive abandonments of pegged exchange-rate regimes associated with devaluations. To explore this hypothesis, we estimate VAR models to compare the responses to devaluation of developing economies and two types of industrial economies: those that have consistently floated, and those that have sustained fixed exchange-rate regimes as well. We find that both of these types of industrial economies exhibit conventional (i.e., expansionary) responses to devaluation shocks, compared with the contractionary responses exhibited by developing countries. This finding suggests that exchange rate movements may be more destabilizing in developing countries than in industrial countries, regardless of exchange rate regime.
Topic:
Economics, Emerging Markets, Industrial Policy, and International Trade and Finance

5035. Identifying the Role of Moral Hazard in International Financial Markets

Author:
Steven B. Kamin
Publication Date:
09-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
Considerable attention has been paid to the possibility that large-scale IMF-led financing packages may have distorted incentives in international financial markets, leading private investors to provide more credit to emerging market countries, and at lower interest rates, than might otherwise have been the case. Yet, prior attempts to identify such distortions have yielded mixed evidence, at best. This paper makes three contributions to our ability to assess the empirical importance of moral hazard in international financial markets. First, it is argued that because large international "bailouts" did not commence until the 1995 Mexican crisis, financial indicators prior to that time could not have reflected a significant degree of this type of moral hazard. Therefore, one test for the existence of moral hazard is that the access of emerging markets to international credit is significantly easier than it was prior to 1995. Second, the paper argues that because private investors expect large-scale IMF-led packages to be extended primarily to economically or geo-politically important countries, moral hazard, if it exists, should lead these countries to have easier terms of access to credit than smaller, non-systemically important countries. Finally, in addition to looking at bond spreads, the focus of earlier empirical analyses of moral hazard, the paper also examines trends in capital flows to gauge the access of emerging market countries to external finance. Looking at the evidence in light of these considerations, the paper concludes that there is little support for the view that moral hazard is significantly distorting international capital markets at the present time.
Topic:
International Relations, Economics, Emerging Markets, and International Trade and Finance

5036. On the Fragility of Gains from Trade under Continuously Differentiated Bertrand Competition

Author:
Mario Marazzi
Publication Date:
09-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
One of the most widely accepted principles of economics is the existence of gains from trade for every nation under certain conditions including perfect competition. In the last twenty years, trade economists have revolutionized the field by firmly establishing the possibility of modeling imperfectly competitive international markets. Despite this development, most still agree there are good reasons to believe that gains from trade are still present. However, we show that in the absence of international redistributions the presence of a positive profit sector in a general equilibrium model can lead to a situation in which some nations may lose from the reduction of international trade barriers.
Topic:
International Relations, Economics, Emerging Markets, and International Trade and Finance

5037. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America-2002

Publication Date:
09-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
The United States possesses unprecedented— and unequaled—strength and influence in the world. Sustained by faith in the principles of liberty, and the value of a free society, this position comes with unparalleled responsibilities, obligations, and opportunity. The great strength of this nation must be used to promote a balance of power that favors freedom.
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, and Economics
Political Geography:
United States

5038. The Inflation Persistence of Staggered Contracts

Author:
Luca Guerrieri
Publication Date:
08-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
One of the criticisms routinely advanced against models of the business cycle with staggered contracts is their inability to generate inflation persistence. This paper finds that staggered contracts µa la Taylor are, in fact, capable of reproducing the inflation persistence implied by U.S. data. Following Fuhrer and Moore, I capture the moments that the contract specification needs to replicate by using the correlograms from a small vector autoregression (VAR) that includes inflation among the endogenous variables. A simple structural model substitutes the inflation equation from the VAR with the contract specification. I estimate the contract parameters in the structural model by maximum likelihood. The correlogram for the endogenous variables from the estimated structural model, including that for inflation, are very close to the correlograms from the VAR (and are contained within their 90% confidence intervals). By the same metric, where Taylor contracts do not fare well is in reproducing the cross-correlations between inflation and output.
Topic:
International Relations, Economics, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States

5039. Productivity Shocks, Habits, and the Current Account

Author:
Joseph W. Gruber
Publication Date:
08-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
Empirical work regarding Intertemporal Current Account (ICA) models has centered around two distinct testing methodologies, present value tests and a productivity shock approach as formulated by Glick and Rogoff (1995). In previous work, Gruber (2001), I have tested and ICA model that allows for habits in aggregate consumption via the present value method. This paper applies the alternative Glick and Rogoff style approach to testing the model. The benefits of doing such are an ability to separate country-specific from worldwide output changes, a distinction of considerable importance, as well as to impose restrictions on the relationship between investment and output, neither of which are possible in the present value framework. The results of the test are supportive of the existence of habits and coincide with the results of Gruber (2001). The degree of habit persistence implied by the model is estimated for the G-7 countries. The paper also proposes habit formation as a possible solution to an empirical puzzle identified in the original Glick and Rogoff paper.
Topic:
International Relations, Economics, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States

5040. Testing the Null of Identification in GMM

Author:
Jonathan H. Wright
Publication Date:
07-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
This paper proposes a new test of the null hypothesis that a generalized method of moments model is identified. The test can detect local or global underidentification, and underidentification in some or all directions. The idea of the test is to compare the volume of two confidence sets -- one that is robust to lack of identification and one that is not. Under the null hypothesis the relative volume of these two sets is Op(1), but under the alternative, the robust confidence set has high probability of being unbounded.
Topic:
Economics and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States