All in the same boat? East Anglia, the North Sea World and the 1147 expedition to Lisbon

Unpaginated submission version of chapter published in East Anglia and the North Sea World

The significance of the Carolingian advocate

This article argues that ninth-century advocates in the Frankish world deserve more attention than they have received. Exploring some of the wealth of relevant evidence, it reviews and critiques both current historiographical approaches to the issue. Instead of considering Carolingian advocates as largely a by-product of the ecclesiastical immunity, or viewing advocacy as a Trojan horse for a subsequent establishment of lordship over monasteries, the article proposes a reading of ninth-century advocacy as intimately linked with wider Carolingian reform, particularly an interest in promoting formal judicial procedure

Group Formation in the Long Tenth Century: a View from Trier and its Region

Unpaginated version of book chapter published in Christine Kleinjung and Stefan Albrecht (eds.), Das lange 10. Jahrhundert – Struktureller Wandel zwischen Zentralisierung und Fragmentierung, äußerem Druck und innerer Krise (Mainz, 2015), pp. 49–5

Exchange rates and fundamentals

Standard economic models hold that exchange rates are influenced by fundamental variables such as relative money supplies, outputs, inflation rates and interest rates. Nonetheless, it has been well documented that such variables little help predict changes in floating exchange rates Š that is, exchange rates follow a random walk. We show that the data do exhibit a related link suggested by standard models - that the exchange rate helps predict fundamentals. We also show analytically that in a rational expectations present value model, an asset price manifests near random walk behavior if fundamentals are I(1) and the factor for discounting future fundamentals is near one. We suggest that this may apply to exchange rates.

Accounting for Exchange Rate Variability in Present-Value Models When the Discount Factor is Near One

Nominal exchange rates in low-inflation advanced countries are nearly random walks. Engel and West (2003a) offer an explanation for this in the context of models in which the exchange rate is determined as the discounted sum of current and expected future fundamentals. Engel and West show that if the fundamentals are I(1), then as the discount factor approaches one, the exchange rate becomes indistinguishable from a random walk. An alternative explanation for the random-walk behavior of exchange rates is that there are some unobserved variables that drive exchange rates that follow near random walks. This paper takes the approach that both explanations are possible. We are able to measure how much of exchange-rate variation could be accounted for by the Engel-West explanation, despite the fact that we do not observe the information set of financial markets. We find that the observable fundamentals (money, income, prices, interest rates) may account for about 40 percent of the variance of changes in exchange rates under the assumption of discount factors near unity.

Taylor Rules and the Deutschmark-Dollar Real Exchange Rate

We explore the link between an interest rate rule for monetary policy and the behavior of the real exchange rate. The interest rate rule, in conjunction with some standard assumptions, implies that the deviation of the real exchange rate from its steady state depends on the present value of a weighted sum of inflation and output gap differentials. The weights are functions of the parameters of the interest rate rule. An initial look at German data yields some support for the model.

Exchange Rates and Fundamentals

We show analytically that in a rational expectations present value model, an asset price manifests near random walk behavior if fundamentals are I(1) and the factor for discounting future fundamentals is near one. We argue that this result helps explain the well known puzzle that fundamental variables such as relative money supplies, outputs, inflation and interest rates provide little help in predicting changes in floating exchange rates. As well, we show that the data do exhibit a related link suggested by standard models - that the exchange rate helps predict these fundamentals. The implication is that exchange rates and fundamentals are linked in a way that is broadly consistent with asset pricing models of the exchange rate.

Clarinet Studio

Day Tw

Woodwind Ensembles

As a result of an equipment malfunction, portions of this performance were not recorded and the last selection was recorded using primitive methods. Program information not available