Adaptive Learning and Monetary Policy: Lessons from Japan

Motivated by Japan's economic experiences and policy debates over the past two decades, this paper uses a dynamic general equilibrium open economy model to examine the volatility and welfare impact of alternative monetary policies. To capture the dynamic effects of likely structural breaks in the Japanese economy, we model agents’ expectation formation process with an adaptive learning framework, and compare four Taylor-styled policy rules that reflect concerns commonly raised in Japan's actual monetary policy debate. We first show that imperfect knowledge and the associated learning process induce higher volatility in the economy, while still retaining some of the policy conclusions from rational-expectations setups. In particular, explicit exchange rate stabilization is unwarranted; moreover, under volatile foreign disturbances, policymakers should consider targeting domestic price inflation rather than consumer price inflation. However, contrary to results based on rational expectations, we show that even though highly inflation-sensitive rules do raise output volatility, they may nevertheless improve overall welfare in an adaptive learning setting by smoothing inflation fluctuations. Our findings suggest that previous policy conclusions that are based on partial equilibrium analyses, or that ignore likely deviations from rational expectations, may not be robust.

A Macro-Finance Approach to Exchange Rate Determination

The nominal exchange rate is both a macroeconomic variable equilibrating international markets and a financial asset that embodies expectations and prices risks associated with cross border currency holdings. Recognizing this, we adopt a joint macro-finance strategy to model the exchange rate. We incorporate into a monetary exchange rate model macroeconomic stabilization through Taylor-rule monetary policy on one hand, and on the other, market expectations and perceived risks embodied in the cross-country yield curves. Using monthly data between 1985 and 2005 for Canada, Japan, the UK and the US, we employ a state-space system to model the relative yield curves between country-pairs using the Nelson and Siegel (1987) latent factors, and combine them with monetary policy targets (output gap and inflation) into a vector autoregression (VAR) for bilateral exchange rate changes. We find strong evidence that both the financial and macro variables are important for explaining exchange rate dynamics and excess currency returns, especially for the yen and the pound rates relative to the dollar. Moreover, by decomposing the yield curves into expected future yields and bond market term premiums, we show that both expectations about future macroeconomic conditions and perceived risks are priced into the currencies. These findings provide support for the view that the nominal exchange rate is determined by both macroeconomic as well as financial forces.

What Does the Yield Curve Tell Us About Exchange Rate Predictability?

This paper uses information contained in the cross-country yield curves to test the asset-pricing approach to exchange rate determination, which models the nominal exchange rate as the discounted present value of its expected future fundamentals. Research on the term structure of interest rates has long argued that the yield curve contains information about future economic activity such as GDP growth and inflation. Bringing this lesson to the international context, we extract the Nelson-Siegel (1987) factors of relative level, slope, and curvature from cross-country yield differences to proxy expected movements in future exchange rate fundamentals. Using monthly data between 1985-2005 for the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and the US, we show that the yield curve factors indeed can explain and predict bilateral exchange rate movements and excess currency returns one month to two years ahead. Out-of-sample analysis also shows the yield curve factors to outperform a random walk in forecasting short-term exchange rate returns.

Growth and Inequality in a Small Open Economy

This paper analyzes the growth and inequality tradeoff for a small open economy where agents differ in their initial endowments of capital stock and international bond-holdings. Our analysis focuses on the distributional impacts of different structural shocks through their effects on agents’ relative wealth and their labor supply decisions. Supplementing the theoretical analysis with numerical simulations, we demonstrate that openness – access to an international capital market – has important consequences on the growth-inequality tradeoff. Specifically, the growth and distributional consequences of structural shocks depend crucially on whether the underlying heterogeneity originates with the initial endowment of domestic capital or foreign bonds.

Black, Slave, Woman—The Role of Slave Women in the Ante-bellum South

There is a famous Chinese proverb which says “a good man never fights with a woman.” From the viewpoint of this Chinese custom, women should always be respected. This maxim certainly was never applied to Black women in the Ante-bellum south of the United States prior to the Civil War. The intent of this paper is to bring to the attention of the reader some of the inhumanity practiced on slave women when they were required to work, without pay, on the plantations in the American South before that country’s Civil War. The women learned quickly to “respect” the “lash” which beat them if they did not do their work properly, or sassed their master. Slavery, at its best, is a terrible institution, and this paper does not address the subject of slavery in other parts of the world. This study is designed to study the plight of Black women, and their struggles, in that time of supposed Southern “gentility.” This study will also attempt to provide an insight into the work and family life of Black women in the era of the Antebellum South

Labor Market Density and Increasing Returns to Scale: How Strong is the Evidence?

Models of economic geography posit that the density of economic activity has two e¤ects that oppose each other in equilibrium: decreasing returns to productive activities due to congestion e¤ects and increasing returns that result from information spillovers and local demand externalities. In an in�uential paper, Ciccone and Hall (1996) looked at the effect of county level labor market concentration on per-worker Gross State Product in a cross section of US States, and observed that on net, the increasing returns/agglomeration effect dominates. We extend their analysis and re-examine the relationship between density and productivity across industries and over both states and time. Through careful identi�cation of the source and nature of productivity shocks, we show that the evidence for agglomeration effects is indeed quite robust, even within industries, providing evidence for the presence of Marshallian externalities. As for the balance of agglomeration and congestion e¤ects found in previous literature, what we call �net increasing returns to scale", the evidence is much weaker.

Can Exchange Rates Forecast Commodity Prices?

This paper demonstrates that “commodity currency” exchange rates have remarkably robust power in predicting future global commodity prices, both in-sample and out-of-sample. A critical element of our in-sample approach is to allow for structural breaks, endemic to empirical exchange rate models, by implementing the approach of Rossi (2005b). Aside from its practical implications, our forecasting results provide perhaps the most convincing evidence to date that the exchange rate depends on the present value of identifiable exogenous fundamentals. We also find that the reverse relationship holds; that is, that commodity prices Granger-cause exchange rates. However, consistent with the vast post-Meese-Rogoff (1983a,b) literature on forecasting exchange rates, we find that the reverse forecasting regression does not survive out-of-sample testing. We argue, however, that it is quite plausible that exchange rates will be better predictors of exogenous commodity prices than vice-versa, because the exchange rate is fundamentally forward looking. Therefore, following Campbell and Shiller (1987) and Engel and West (2005), the exchange rate is likely to embody important information about future commodity price movements well beyond what econometricians can capture with simple time series models. In contrast, prices for most commodities are extremely sensitive to small shocks to current demand and supply, and are therefore likely to be less forward looking. J.E.L. Codes: C52, C53, F31, F47. Key words: Exchange rates, forecasting, commodity prices, random walk. Acknowledgements. We would like to thank C. Burnside, C. Engel, M. McCracken, R. Startz, V. Stavreklava, A. Tarozzi, M. Yogo and seminar participants at the University of Washington for comments. We are also grateful to various staff members of the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Bank of Canada, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and the IMF for helpful discussions and for providing some of the data used in this paper.

CAN EXCHANGE RATES FORECAST COMMODITY PRICES?

This paper studies the dynamic relationship between exchange rate fluctuations and world commodity price movements. Taking into account parameter instability, we demonstrate surprisingly robust evidence that exchange rates predict world commodity price movements, both in-sample and out-of-sample. Because commodity prices are exogenous to the exchange rates we consider, we are able to overcome the identification problems that plague the existing empirical exchange rate literature. Because our finding that exchange rates predict future commodity prices can be given a true causal interpretation, it provides the most concrete support yet for the importance of selected macroeconomic fundamentals in determining exchange rates. As an important by-product of our analysis, we show that exchange rate-based forecasts may be a viable alternative for predicting future commodity price movements.Exchange rates, forecasting, commodity prices, random walk