THREE ESSAYS ON REGIONAL ECONOMIC INTEGRATION AND EXCHANGE RATE REGIMES

This dissertation consists of three independent essays addressing several key issues related to the empirical application of optimum currency area. The first essay explores the features of the CFA franc zone by operationalizing Robert Mundell’s (1952) criteria for an optimum currency area. A vector autoregression method is used in modeling national outputs as determined by global, regional and country-specific shocks. It finds that domestic outputs of the CFA franc zone countries are strongly influenced by country-specific shocks. These results suggest that the CFA franc zone countries are structurally different from each other and the monetary union may have been a costly arrangement for the member countries. The second essay focuses on the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU). A 2-vairable vector autoregressive model is estimated to investigate the extent of symmetric shocks in the small open economies of the ECCU. The paper finds that domestic outputs of the ECCU countries are strongly influenced by regional shocks. These results indicate that the ECCU countries are structurally similar to each other and exchange arrangements appear to have well served the region and the group of countries is more likely to be an optimum currency area. The third essay explores the possibility of a currency union in East Asia. In this essay, the extent of global and regional integration in East Asia is investigated using the stock price index as a measure of economic performance. A similar VAR model is employed to separate the underlying shocks into global, regional and country-specific shocks. The estimation results show that country-specific shocks play a dominant role in East Asia although their role appears to have declined over time, especially after the 1997 financial crisis. Global and regional shocks are responsible for small but increasing shares of stock price fluctuations in most countries. The results indicate that, despite years of liberalization and regional integration, economies in East Asia remain dissimilar and are subject to asymmetric shocks and it might be costly for East Asian countries to abandon monetary policy independence to form a monetary union and that a more flexible exchange rate regime might be desirable

Fast and Accurate Computation of Time-Domain Acoustic Scattering Problems with Exact Nonreflecting Boundary Conditions

This paper is concerned with fast and accurate computation of exterior wave equations truncated via exact circular or spherical nonreflecting boundary conditions (NRBCs, which are known to be nonlocal in both time and space). We first derive analytic expressions for the underlying convolution kernels, which allow for a rapid and accurate evaluation of the convolution with $O(N_t)$ operations over $N_t$ successive time steps. To handle the onlocality in space, we introduce the notion of boundary perturbation, which enables us to handle general bounded scatters by solving a sequence of wave equations in a regular domain. We propose an efficient spectral-Galerkin solver with Newmark's time integration for the truncated wave equation in the regular domain. We also provide ample numerical results to show high-order accuracy of NRBCs and efficiency of the proposed scheme.Comment: 22 pages with 9 figure

A new two-component sasa-satuma equation: large-time asymaptotics on the line

We consider the initial value problem for a new two-component Sasa-Satsuma equation associated with the fourth-order Lax pair with decaying initial data on the line. By utilizing the spectral analysis, the solution of the new two-component Sasa-Satsuma system is transformed into the solution of a fourth-order matrix Riemann-Hilbert problem. Then the long-time asymptotics of the solution is obtained by means of the nonlinear steepest descent method of Deift and Zhou for oscillatory Riemann-Hilbert problems. We show that there are three main regions in the half-plane, where the asymptotics has qualitatively different forms: a left fast decaying sector, a central Painleve sector where the asymptotics is described in terms of the solution of a new coupled Painleve II equation which is related to a fourth-order matrix Riemann-Hilbert problem, and a right slowly decaying oscillatory sector