The sustainability of China's exchange rate policy and capital account liberalisation.

This paper deals with two related issues: the sustainability of China’s exchange rate regime and the opening up of its capital account. The exchange rate discussion deliberately passes over the issue of the “equilibrium” value of the renminbi and its alleged undervaluation – typically at the heart of the current policy debate – and focuses instead on the domestic costs of the current regime and the potential risks to domestic financial stability in the long run. The paper argues that the renminbi exchange rate should be increasingly determined by market forces and that administrative controls should be progressively relinquished. The exchange rate is obviously linked to well-functioning and efficient capital markets, which require no barriers to capital flows. Thus, exchange rate reform has to be correctly sequenced with reform of the capital account to avoid disruptive capital flows. The paper discusses China’s twin surpluses of the current and capital accounts and attempts to identify the drivers of this “anomalous” external position. The pragmatic strategy pursued by the Chinese authorities in the aftermath of the Asian crisis encouraged FDI inflows and favoured the accumulation of a large stock of foreign exchange reserves. Combined with a relatively weak institutional setting, these factors have been important determinants of the pattern and composition of the country’s capital flows and international investment position. Finally, the paper speculates on the outlook for Chinese capital flows should barriers to capital movements be lifted. It argues that whether China continues to supply capital to the rest of the world or eventually becomes a net borrower in international capital markets – as was the case for most of its recent history – will depend on the evolution of its institutions. JEL Classification: F10, F21, F31, F32, P48.China, exchange rate policy, international investment position, capital account liberalisation, institutions.

Uncovered interest parity at distant horizons: evidence on emerging economies & nonlinearities

This paper tests for uncovered interest parity (UIP) at distant horizons for the US and its main trading partners, including both mature and emerging market economies, also exploring the existence of nonlinearities. At long and medium horizons, it finds support in favour of the standard, linear, specification of UIP for dollar rates vis-à-vis major floating currencies, but not vis-à-vis emerging market currencies. Moreover, the paper finds evidence that, not only yield differentials widen, but that US bond yields do react in anticipation of exchange rate movements, notably when these take place vis-à-vis major floating currencies. Last, the paper detects signs of nonlinearities in UIP at the mediumterm horizon for dollar rates vis-à-vis some of the major floating currencies, albeit surrounded by some uncertainty. JEL Classification: E43, F31, F41distant horizon, emerging economies, Nonlinearities, Uncovered interest parity

International CAPM with Regime Switching GARCH Parameters

This paper tests a conditional version of Adler and Dumas'(1983) International CAPM with regime switching GARCH parameters. As benchmark the same model is estimated without state dependent parameters. The switching representation is found to react faster than the benchmark to shocks in stock market returns. This suggests that the non-switching model suffers from spuriously high persistence. In particular, when a financial crisis occurs, the conditional risk exposures appear to be underestimated, while overestimated in the aftermath. The introduction of a regime switching model should hence improve forecasting power. We also find that in periods of financial turmoil, weight is shifting from the GARCH, towards the ARCH termes of the conditional covariance generating process. During such events investors, when formin their (co)variance expectations, seem to put more emphasis on current shocks, at the expense of the current second moments.International CAPM; Multivariate GARCH-in-Mean; Regime Switching

Explaining exchange rate dynamics: the uncovered equity return parity condition

By employing Lucas’ (1982) model, this study proposes an arbitrage relationship – the Uncovered Equity Return Parity (URP) condition – to explain the dynamics of exchange rates. When expected equity returns in a country/region are lower than expected equity returns in another country/region, the currency associated with the market offering lower returns is expected to appreciate. First, we test the URP assuming that investors are risk neutral and next we relax this hypothesis. The resulting risk premia are proxied by economic variables, which are related to the business cycle. We employ differentials in corporate earnings’ growth rates, short-term interest rate changes, annual inflation rates, and net equity flows. The URP explains a large fraction of the variability of some European currencies vis-à-vis the US dollar. When confronted with the naïve random walk model, the URP for the EUR/USD performs better in terms of forecasts for a set of alternative statistics. JEL Classification: D82, G14, G15asset pricing, foreign exchange markets, GMM, random walk, UIP

Measuring comovements by regression quantiles

This paper develops a rigorous econometric framework to investigate the structure of codependence between random variables and to test whether it changes over time. Our approach is based on the computation - over both a test and a benchmark period - of the conditional probability that a random variable yt is lower than a given quantile, when the other random variable xt is also lower than its corresponding quantile, for any set of prespecified quantiles. Time-varying conditional quantiles are modeled via regression quantiles. The conditional probability is estimated through a simple OLS regression. We illustrate the methodology by investigating the impact of the crises of the 1990s on the major Latin American equity markets returns. Our results document significant increases in equity return co-movements during crises consistent with the presence of financial contagion. JEL Classification: C14, C22, G15codependence, conditional quantiles, semi-parametric