Does global currency volume increase on days when the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meets? To test the hypothesis of excess currency volume on FOMC days, we use a novel data set from the Continuous Linked Settlement (CLS) Bank. The CLS measure captures roughly half of the global trading volume in foreign exchange (FX) markets. We find strong evidence that trading volume increases in the order of 5% across currency areas on FOMC days during 2003 to 2007. This result holds irrespective of the size of price changes in currency markets and FOMC policy shocks. The new evidence of excess FX trading on FOMC days is inconsistent with standard models of the asset market approach with homogenous agents.
While the direct impact of geographic endowments on prosperity is present in all countries, in former colonies, geography has also affected colonization policies and institutional outcomes. Thus, one can disentangle the partial effects of endowments and institutions on income by utilizing the interaction of geography and colonial experience. I first document that climate and disease did affect institutional development in the group of former colonies while this is not the case in the rest of the world. Second, I develop an empirical strategy that identifies the relation between institutions and income but that also accounts for the direct effect of endowments. I find that institutions are the main determinant of development and that endowments also have a sizeable direct impact on development. Third, I highlight the importance of disease environment for both colonization policies and income directly.
When unemployment prevails, relations with a particular firm are valuable for workers. As a consequence, a worker may adhere to an implicit agreement to provide high effort, even when performance is no third-party enforceable. But can implicit agreements - or relational contracts - also motivate high worker performance when the labor market is tight? We examine this question by implementing an experimental market in which there is an excess demand for labor and the performance of workers is not third-party enforceable. We show that relational contracts emerge in which firms reward performing workers with wages that exceed the going market rate. This motivates workers to provide high effort, even though they could shirk and switch firms. Our results thus suggest that unemployment is not a necessary device to motivate workers. We also discuss how market conditions affect relational contracting by comparing identical labor markets with excess supply and excess demand for labor. Long-term relationships turn out to be less frequent when there is excess demand for labor compared to a market characterized by unemployment. Surprisingly though, this does not compromise market performance.
This paper builds up an extension to the Mussa and Rosen (1978) model of quality pricing under perfect competition. Our model incorporates decreasing returns to scale. First, we predict that exchange rate shocks are imperfectly passed through into prices. Second, prices of low quality goods are more sensitive to exchange rate shocks than prices of high quality goods. Third, in response to an exchange rate appreciation, the composition of exports shifts towards higher quality and more expensive goods. We test those predictions using highly disaggregated price and quantity US import data. We find that the prices of high quality goods, proxied as high unit price goods, are more sensitive to exchange rate movements. Moreover, we find evidence that in response to an exchange rate appreciation, the composition of exports shifts towards high unit price goods.
Are weekly inflation forecasts informative? Although several central banks review and discuss monetary policy issues on a bi-weekly basis, there have been few attempts by analysts to construct systematic estimates of core inflation that supports such a decision-making schedule. The timeliness of news releases and macroeconomic revisions are recognized to be an important information source in real-time estimation. We incorporate real-time information from macroeconomic releases and revisions into our weekly updates of monthly Swiss core inflation using a common factor procedure. The weekly estimates for Swiss core inflation find that it is worthwhile to update the forecast at least twice a month.
In this paper I examine how the protection of creditors' rights influence the way in which foreign bank entry affects the access to credit of firms. Using a sample of more than 6000 firms in 22 transition countries I find that as bankruptcy proceedings become more inefficient foreign bank entry is more likely to crowd-out small and opaque firms. Conversely, as the protection of creditors' rights improve, the positive association between foreign banks and firms' credit constraints diminishes. These results are robust to controls for endogeneity of foreign banks. The interaction of foreign banks and the protection of creditors rights would explain the disparity of results obtained by previous studies: In countries with an adequate protection of creditor rights foreign bank entry may benefit all firms; By contrast, in countries with weak protection of creditor rights foreign bank entry is likely to result in a credit crunch.
This paper uses vector error correction models of Switzerland for forecasting output, inflation and the short-term interest rate. It considers three different ways of dealing with forecast uncertainties. First, it investigates the effect on forecasting performance of averaging over forecasts from different models. Second, it considers averaging forecasts from different estimation windows. It is found that averaging over estimation windows is at least as effective as averaging over different models and both complement each other. Third, it examines whether using weighting schemes from the machine learning literature improves the average forecast. Compared to equal weights the effect of alternative weighting schemes on forecast accuracy is small in the present application.
We construct a factor model of the yield curve and specify time series processes for these factors, so that the innovations are mutually orthogonal. At the same time, the factors are constructed in such a way that they assume clear, intuitive interpretations. The resulting "intelligible factors" should prove useful for investment professionals to discuss expectations about yield curves and the implied dynamics. Moreover, they allow us to distinguish announced changes of the monetary policy stance versus monetary policy surprises, which are ctually rare. We identify two such events, namely September 11, 2001, and the Fed reaction to the recent subprime crisis.
We examine how asymmetric information and competition in the credit market affect voluntary information sharing between lenders. We study an experimental credit market in which information sharing can help lenders to distinguish good borrowers from bad ones, ecause borrowers may exogenously switch locations. Lenders are, however, engaged in spatial competition, and thus may lose market power by sharing information with competitors. Our results suggest that asymmetric information in the credit market increases the frequency of information sharing between lenders significantly. Competition between lenders reduces information sharing, but the impact of competition seems to be only of second order importance.
We study high-frequency exchange rate movements over the sample 1993-2006. We document that the (Swiss) franc, euro, Japanese yen and the pound tend to appreciate against the U.S. dollar when (a) S&P has negative returns; (b) U.S. bond prices increase; and (c) when currency markets become more volatile. In these situations, the franc appreciates also against the other currencies, while the pound depreciates. These safe haven properties of the franc are visible for different time granularities (from a few hours to several days), during both "ordinary days" and crisis episodes and show some non-linear features.
