Money Surprises and Short-Term Interest Rates: Reconciling ContradictoryFindings

This note attempts to reconcile contradictory findings regarding the impact of money surprises on short term interest rates. Expectations effects regarding anticipated monetary policy and anticipated inflation suggest a positive relationship. Liquidity and output effects of monetary surprises suggest a negative relationship. It is shown that intra-day data and end-of-period data will capture expectations effects while period average data will capture liquidity/output effects. Seemingly contradictory results are reconciled by differences in dependent variables employed by various authors.

Flexible exchange rates, multinational corporations, and accounting standards

Foreign exchange rates ; International business enterprises ; Financial Accounting Standards Board ; Accounting

Exchange Rates and Taxes

This paper demonstrates that different rates of taxation on interest income and exchange gains may bias results of hypothesis testing regarding critical aspects of exchange rate behavior. Two problems are discussed specifically. First, it is shown that omission of tax considerations may bias tests of the uncovered interest parity condition toward acceptance of a "risk premium" hypothesis, conditional on exchange market efficiency. Second it is shown that a rational solution for the exchange rate conditions the relationship between an exchange rate and its determinants on two regimes: (1) tax rates on interest income and foreign exchange gains and losses at home and abroad and (2) the degree of foreign exchange market intervention and sterilization of its effects on the monetary base practiced by central banks.

Exchange Rate Behavior under Full Monetary Equilibrium: An Empirical Analysis

This paper aims to remedy difficulties with some extant empirical tests of the monetary approach to exchange rate determination. Four problems are addressed: explication of and allowance for real exchange rate changes; imposition of interest parity; use of the forward rate as an unbiased predictor of the spot rate; and modeling implications of official intervention in foreign exchange markets and of possible efforts to sterilize effects of intervention in the monetary base. Empirical tests conducted with monthly data on the dollar-DM exchange rate from March, 1973 -December,1979 do not permit rejection of the complex joint hypothesis represented by equations estimated to test the monetary approach. Still, there remained unexplained a large portion of the behavior of the dollar-DM exchange rate in the 1973-79 monthly sample employed. This result suggests that exchange rates may be viewed as prices determined in asset markets where a large and unsystematic flow of information, not captured by monetary or other variables, produces large, unsystematic movements.

Anticipated Money, Inflation Uncertainty, and Real Economic Activity

This paper critically examines a number of maintained hypotheses that are necessarily being tested along with the basic notion derived from the rational expectations (RE) formulation of Lucas (1972) (19 73) that "only unanticipated money matters." The trend stationary representation of secular real output of Lucas and others is replaced by a difference stationary representation found by Nelson and Plosser (1980) to be consistent with U. S. historical data. The impact of inflation uncertainty on real activity is considered. Attention is paid to possible mis-measurement of agents' ex ante -- anticipated money growth. It is found that three alternative measures of anticipated money growth produce a stable impact on growth of output and employment. Contemporaneous and lagged values of unanticipated money growth have no significant additional explanatory power in the presence of any one of the three measures of anticipated money growth. Beyond this, it is impossible to reject the hypothesis that the initial positive real impact of anticipated money is not temporary. Inflation uncertainty is found to act as a significant depressant of real economic activity in the presence of all tested combinations of anticipated and unanticipated money growth.

A Fiscal Framework for Analysis of Interest Rate Behavior in Open Economies

This paper derives a reduced-form expression for an interestrate in an open economy by incorporating after tax covered interest parity conditions into a simple neo-classical macro model. The result clearly demonstrates that the relationship between an interest rate and variables used to explain it is conditional on income tax rates at home and abroad and presence or absence of capital gains tax treatment of foreign exchange gains or losses. Effects of non-indexation of tax treatment of depreciation and inventories may also play a role. Any change in effective tax rates over a sample period employed to estimate interest rate (or exchange rate) equations may cause deterioration in the fit of a fixed coefficient model. Efforts are underway to employ a random coefficients approach to address this problem.

The Level and Volatility of Interest Rates in the United States: The Roles of Expected Inflation, Real Rates, and Taxes

This paper attempts to demonstrate a need to expand the simple Fisherian view whereby changes in interest rates are explained largely by changes in expected inflation. It presents and tests a model of expected, after-tax real interest rate behavior which, together with a group of explanatory variables suggested by a structural model, takes full account of implications of a broad range of U.S. tax code provisions for behavior of interest rates. Determinants of interest rate volatility are also investigated.The model and results of empirical testing suggest:(1) why the measured impact on interest rates of changes in anticipated inflation has been below levels anticipated by many investigators; (2) how the measured impact on interest rates of explanatory variables is conditional on tax rates which may change over time; (3) larger than expected fiscal deficits have a moderate positive impact on interest rates (40 basis points per 100 billion annual rise for three-month Treasury bills) while lower than expected money growth may also raise interest rates (as iri the second quarter of 1981 when it did so by an estimated 24 basis points);(4) inflation uncertainty produces no significant impact on interest rates due to the econometric effect of including a measure of excess capacity; (5) an unexpected rise in money demand may be responsible for persistently higher interest rates during the first half of 1982 but during most of the 1960-82 period money supply shocks had a more powerful impact on interest rates.

Inflation Uncertainty and Interest Rates: Theory and Empirical Tests

This paper develops two models, one involving risk neutrality and the other risk aversion, which suggest that inflation uncertainty affects interest rates. Both models give rise to essentially the same interest rate equation for estimation. Empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that inflation uncertainty affects interest rates. Interpreted in terms of the risk neutral model, the empirical results suggest that inflation uncertainty has a negative impact on nominal interest rates and a positive impact on the expected real rate. If the results are interpreted in terms of the risk averse model, inflation uncertainty has a negative impact on nominal interest rates. The expected real rate is not of direct interest in a risk averse world. The results raise real questions about the use of the Fisherian definition of the real interest rate in situations when there is uncertainty about inflation rates. It is argued that even with risk neutrality the Fisherian definition of the real rate is not the appropriate concept upon which to base economic decisions if inflation uncertainty is present. The appropriate concept is an expected real rate which involves an adjustment for uncertainty. Moreover, if the world is risk averse, the expected real rate is not a relevant concept for economic decisions.

Exchange Rate Determination with Systematic and Unsystematic Policy Regime Changes: Evidence From the Yen/Dollar Rate

This paper presents results of estimating an exchange rate equation in light of theoretical considerations regarding changes in sterilization and intervention policy and tax policy which imply that the coefficients in the equation will not behave as fixed parameters in a given sample period,as standard econometric practice assumes. We compare the results of ordinary least squares and a random coefficients model of the Japanese Yen-- U.S. dollar exchange rate during the floating period of July 1973 through June 1982.When systematic end of year policy changes affecting Japanese reserves are explicitly modeled, both OLS and the random coefficients model show increased explanatory power. The random coefficients model appears to be superior to OLS however; by allowing the coefficients to vary over time as required by the economic theory discussed above, estimates of the mean response coefficients for the floating period all have the hypothesized sign, and explanatory power is sharply increased.

International Capital Flows under Full Monetary Equilibrium: An Empirical Analysis

This paper develops a theory of international capital flows based upon a monetary-equilibrium, rational-expectation theory of exchanged rate determination extended to include the official intervention and possible sterilization of its effects upon the monetary base that are part of the post-1973 system of limited flexibility of exchange rates. Capital flows are shown to depend only on the current expectation of a future relative excess money supplies once all arbitrage conditions are imposed along with rationality. Empirical testing reveals that U.S. international capital flows respond with persistent, damped oscillations to growth of relative excess money. This phenomenon is a quantity adjustment corollary of '"overshooting" of exchange rates in response to changes in relative excess money supply. Inclusion of a relative interest rate term along with measures of growth of relative excess money supply results in rejection of the hypothesis that such a variable provides any additional explanatory power regarding behavior of U.S. international capital flows.