Can oil prices forecast exchange rates?

This paper investigates whether oil prices have a reliable and stable out-of-sample relationship with the Canadian/U.S. dollar nominal exchange rate. Despite state-of-the-art methodologies, the authors find little systematic relation between oil prices and the exchange rate at the monthly and quarterly frequencies. In contrast, the main contribution is to show the existence of a very short-term relationship at the daily frequency, which is rather robust and holds no matter whether the authors use contemporaneous (realized) or lagged oil prices in their regression. However, in the latter case the predictive ability is ephemeral, mostly appearing after instabilities have been appropriately taken into account.Foreign exchange rates ; Economic forecasting

The Three Epochs of Oil

We test for changes in price behavior in the longest crude oil price series available (1861-2008). We find strong evidence for changes in persistence and in volatility of price across three well defined periods. We argue that historically, the real price of oil has tended to be highly persistent and volatile whenever rapid industrialization in a major world economy coincided with uncertainty regarding access to supply. We present a modified commodity storage model that fully incorporates demand, and further can accommodate both transitory and permanent shocks. We show that the role of storage when demand is subject to persistent growth shocks is speculative, instead of its classic mitigating role. This result helps to account for the increased volatility of oil price we observe in these periods.Oil Price, Oil Shocks, Storage, Structural Change

Can Oil Prices Forecast Exchange Rates?

This paper investigates whether oil price shocks have a reliable and stable out-of-sample relationship with the Canadian/U.S Dollar nominal exchange rate. Despite state-of-the-art methodologies and clean data, we …find paradoxically little systematic relation between oil prices and the exchange rate, especially if one takes the monthly and quarterly frequencies into account. In contrast, the very short term relationship between oil prices and exchange rates at the daily frequency is rather robust, and holds no matter whether we use contemporaneous (realized) or lagged oil price shocks in our regression. However, the short-term out-of-sample predictive ability is ephemeral, and it mostly appears after time variation in the forecasting ability of the models has been appropriately taken into account. We show that a similar results hold for other currencies and commodity price shocks.

World financial reform

In July 1999, the CEP held a second meeting of policymakers and thinkers to examine in greater detail aspects of the international financial architecture and proposals for its reform. This Special Report includes revised versions of the main papers presented, including those from Peter Kenen, Ken Rogoff, Andrew Haldane from the Bank of England and Olivier Davanne