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Begin New Search Topic International Trade and Finance Political Geography United States Content Type Working Paper Publishing Institution Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

11. U.S. External Adjustment: Is It Disorderly? Is It Unique? Will It Disrupt the Rest of the World?

Author:
Steven B. Kamin and Trevor A. Reeve
Publication Date:
04-2007
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
In recent years, a number of studies have analyzed the experiences of a broad range of industrial economies during periods when their current account deficits have narrowed. Such studies identified systematic aspects of external adjustment, but it is unclear how good a guide the experience of other countries may be to the effects of a future narrowing of the U.S. external imbalance. In contrast, this paper focuses in depth on the historical experience of external adjustment in the United States. Using data from the past thirty-five years, we compare economic performance in episodes during which the U.S. trade balance deteriorated and episodes during which it adjusted. We find trade balance adjustment to have been generally benign: U.S. real GDP growth tended to fall, but not to a statistically significant extent; housing construction slumped; inflation generally rose modestly; and although nominal interest rates tended to rise, real interest rates fell. The paper then compares these outcomes to those in foreign industrial economies. We find that the economic performance of the United States during periods of external adjustment is remarkably similar to the foreign experience. Finally, we also examine the performance of the foreign industrial economies during the periods of U.S. deterioration and adjustment. Contrary to concerns that U.S. adjustment will prove injurious to foreign economies, our analysis suggests that the foreign economies fared reasonably well during past periods when the U.S. trade deficit narrowed: the growth of domestic demand and real GDP abroad generally strengthened during such episodes, although inflation and interest rates tended to rise as well.
Topic:
Economics, Foreign Exchange, International Trade and Finance, and Markets
Political Geography:
United States

12. Real-Time Price Discovery in Global Stock, Bond and Foreign Exchange Markets

Author:
Torben G. Andersen, Tim Bollerslev, Francis X. Diebold, and Clara Vega
Publication Date:
09-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
Using a unique high-frequency futures dataset, we characterize the response of U.S., German and British stock, bond and foreign exchange markets to real-time U.S. macroeconomic news. We find that news produces conditional mean jumps; hence high-frequency stock, bond and exchange rate dynamics are linked to fundamentals. Equity markets, moreover, react differently to news depending on the stage of the business cycle, which explains the low correlation between stock and bond returns when averaged over the cycle. Hence our results qualify earlier work suggesting that bond markets react most strongly to macroeconomic news; in particular, when conditioning on the state of the economy, the equity and foreign exchange markets appear equally responsive. Finally, we also document important contemporaneous links across all markets and countries, even after controlling for the effects of macroeconomic news.
Topic:
Economics, Foreign Exchange, International Trade and Finance, and Markets
Political Geography:
United States

13. The U.S. Current Account Deficit and the Expected Share of World Output

Author:
John H. Rogers and Charles Engel
Publication Date:
04-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
We investigate the possibility that the large current account deficits of the U.S. are the outcome of optimizing behavior. We develop a simple long-run world equilibrium model in which a country's current account is determined by the expected discounted present value of its future share of world GDP relative to its current share of world GDP. The model suggests that under some reasonable assumptions about future U.S. GDP growth relative to the rest of the advanced countries – more modest than the growth over the past 20 years – the current account deficit is near optimal levels. We then explore the implications for the real exchange rate. Under some plausible assumptions, the model implies little change in the real exchange rate over the adjustment path, though the conclusion is sensitive to assumptions about tastes and technology. Then we turn to empirical evidence. Two empirical analyses of current account sustainability using actual data suggest that the U.S. is not keeping on a long-run sustainable path. One is a direct test of our model, which finds that the dynamics of the U.S. current account – the increasing deficits over the past decade – are difficult to explain under a particular statistical model (Markov-switching) of expectations of future U.S. growth. But, if we use survey data on forecasted GDP growth in the G7, our very simple model appears to explain the evolution of the U.S. current account remarkably well. We conclude that expectations of robust performance of the U.S. economy relative to the rest of the advanced countries is a contender – though not the only legitimate contender – for explaining the U.S. current account deficit.
Topic:
Economics, Foreign Exchange, International Trade and Finance, and Markets
Political Geography:
United States

14. Order Flow and Exchange Rate Dynamics in Electronic Brokerage System Data

Author:
Jonathan H. Wright, David W. Berger, Alain P. Chaboud, Sergey V. Chernenko, Edward Howorka, Raj S. Iyer, and David Liu
Publication Date:
04-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
We study the association between order flow and exchange rate returns in five years of high-frequency intraday data from the leading interdealer electronic broking system, EBS. While the association between order flow and exchange rate returns has been studied in several previous papers, these have mostly used relatively short spans of daily data from older bilateral dealing systems and, usually, transaction counts instead of actual trading volume. Using a substantially longer span of recent high-frequency data and measuring order flow as actual signed trading volume, we find a strong positive association between order flow and exchange rate returns at frequencies ranging from one minute to one day, and a more modest but still sizeable association at the monthly frequency. We find, however, no evidence that order flow has predictive power for future exchange rate movements beyond, possibly, the next minute. Focusing on the behavior of order flow and exchange rates at the time of scheduled U.S. economic data releases, we find that the surprise components of these announcements are associated with order flow at high frequency immediately after the data releases. This finding seems inconsistent with a simple efficient markets view of how a public news announcement is incorporated into prices.
Topic:
Economics, International Trade and Finance, and Science and Technology
Political Geography:
United States

15. Adjusting Chinese Bilateral Trade Data: How Big is China's Trade Surplus

Author:
John W. Schindler and Dustin H. Beckett
Publication Date:
04-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
Hong Kong plays a prominent role as a re-exporter of a large percentage of trade bound for or coming from China. Current reporting practices in China and its trading partners do not fully reflect this role and therefore provide a misleading picture of the origin or ultimate destination of Chinese exports and imports. We adjust bilateral trade data for both China and its trading partners to correct for this problem. We also correct for differences due to markups in Hong Kong and different standards for reporting trade (c.i.f. versus f.o.b.). For 2003, we estimate that China's overall trade surplus was between $53 billion and $126 billion, larger than that reported in official Chinese data, but smaller than that reported by China's trading partners. We also provide evidence that, in general, the actual origin of a good that is transshipped through Hong Kong is correctly reported by the importing country, but the final destination of such goods is not correctly reported by the exporting country.
Topic:
Economics and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States, China, and Hong Kong

16. A Flexible Finite-Horizon Identification of Technology Shocks

Author:
Neville Francis, Michael T. Owyang, and Jennifer T. Roush
Publication Date:
04-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
Recent empirical studies using infinite horizon long-run restrictions question the validity of the technology-driven real business cycle hypothesis. These results have met with their own controversy, stemming from their sensitivity to changes in model specification and the general poor performance of long run restrictions in Monte Carlo experiments. We propose a alternative identification that maximizes the contribution of technology shocks to the forecast error variance of labor productivity at a long, but finite horizon. In small samples, our identification outperforms its infinite horizon counterpart by producing less biased impulse responses and technology shocks that are more highly correlated with the technology shocks from the underlying model. For U.S. data, we show that the negative hours response is not robust to allowing a greater role for non-technology shocks in the forecast error variance share at a ten year horizon.
Topic:
Development, Industrial Policy, International Trade and Finance, and Science and Technology
Political Geography:
United States

17. Exchange Rate Pass-through to U.S. Import Prices: Some New Evidence

Author:
Jaime Marquez, Mario Marazzi, Nathan Sheets, Joseph Gagnon, Robert J. Vigfusson, Jon Faust, Robert F. Martin, Trevor Reeve, and John Rogers
Publication Date:
04-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
This paper documents a sustained decline in exchange rate pass-through to U.S. import prices, from above 0.5 during the 1980s to somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.2 during the last decade. This decline in the pass-through coefficient is robust to the measure of foreign prices that is included in the regression (i.e., CPI versus PPI), whether the estimation is done in levels or differences, and whether U.S. prices are included as an explanatory variable. Notably, the largest estimates of pass-through are obtained when commodity prices are excluded from the regression. In this case, the pass-through coefficient captures both the direct effect of the exchange rate on import prices and an indirect effect operating through changes in commodity prices. Our work indicates that an increasing share of exchange rate pass-through has occurred through this commodity-price channel in recent years. While the source of the decline in passthrough is difficult to pin down with certainty, our work points to several factors, including the reduced share of (commodity-intensive) industrial supplies in U.S. imports and the increased presence of Chinese exporters in U.S. markets. We detect a particular step down in the passthrough coefficient around the time of the Asian financial crisis and document a shift in the export pricing behavior of emerging Asian firms around that time.
Topic:
Economics, Industrial Policy, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States and China

18. Investment-Specific and Multifactor Productivity in Multi-Sector Open Economies: Data and Analysis

Author:
Luca Guerrieri, Dale W. Henderson, and Jinill Kim
Publication Date:
02-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
In the last half of the 1990s, labor productivity growth rose in the U.S. and fell almost everywhere in Europe. We document changes in both capital deepening and multifactor productivity (MFP) growth in both the information and communication technology (ICT) and non-ICT sectors. We view MFP growth in the ICT sector as investment-specific productivity (ISP) growth. We perform simulations suggested by the data using a two-country DGE model with traded and nontraded goods. For ISP, we consider level increases and persistent growth rate increases that are symmetric across countries and allow for costs of adjusting capital-labor ratios that are higher in one country because of structural differences. ISP increases generate investment booms unless adjustment costs are too high. For MFP, we consider persistent growth rate shocks that are asymmetric. When such MFP shocks affect only traded goods (as often assumed), movements in 'international' variables are qualitatively similar to those in the data. However, when they also affect nontraded goods (as suggested by the data), movements in some of the variables are not. To obtain plausible results for the growth rate shocks, it is necessary to assume slow recognition.
Topic:
Economics, Emerging Markets, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States and Europe

19. Financial Market Developments and Economic Activity during Current Account Adjustments in Industrial Economies

Author:
Steven B. Kamin, Sylvain Leduc, and Hilary Croke
Publication Date:
02-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
Much has been written about prospects for U.S. current account adjustment, including the possibility of what is sometimes referred to as a “disorderly correction”: a sharp fall in the exchange rate that boosts interest rates, depresses stock prices, and weakens economic activity. This paper assesses some of the empirical evidence bearing on the likelihood of the disorderly correction scenario, drawing on the experience of previous current account adjustments in industrial economies. We examined the paths of key economic performance indicators before, during, and after the onset of adjustment, building on the analysis of Freund (2000).
Topic:
Development, Economics, Industrial Policy, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States

20. International Risk-Sharing and the Transmission of Productivity Shocks

Author:
Sylvain Leduc, Giancarlo Corsetti, and Luca Dedola
Publication Date:
02-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
A central puzzle in international finance is that real exchange rates are volatile and, in stark contradiction to efficient risk-sharing, negatively correlated with cross-country consumption ratios. This paper shows that a standard international business cycle model with incomplete asset markets augmented with distribution services can account quantitatively for these properties of real exchange rates. Distribution services, intensive in local inputs, drive a wedge between producer and consumer prices, thus lowering the impact of terms-of-trade changes on optimal agents' decisions. This reduces the price elasticity of tradables separately from assumptions on preferences.
Topic:
Development, Economics, International Trade and Finance, and Science and Technology
Political Geography:
United States