school competition and teacher labor markets evidence from charter school entry in north carolina abstract i analyze changes in teacher turnover hiring effectiveness and salaries at traditional public schools after the opening of a nearby charter school while i find small effects on turnover overall difficult to staff schools low income high minority share hired fewer new teachers and experienced small declines in teacher quality i also find evidence of a demand side response where schools increased teacher compensation to better retain quality teachers the results are robust across a variety of alternate specifications to account for non random charter entry

central bank intervention and risk in the forward market abstract a two country inter temporal asset pricing model is developed which implies that central bank foreign exchange intervention affects the forward exchange risk premium the model is estimated from daily foreign exchange intervention data for the us german and japanese central banks considerable empirical support is found for the theoretical model with intervention influencing the risk premium in the forward market purchases of dollars by the federal reserve bank are found to be associated with excess denominated returns there is evidence that intervention has increased rather than reduced exchange rate volatility

the effect of charter competition on unionized district revenues and resource allocation abstract this study examines the impact of competition due to charter school entry on the level of revenues and the composition of expenditures within traditional public school districts tpsds i leverage a policy change affecting the location and timing of charter entry to account for endogenous charter competition tpsds respond to competition by allocating resources away from instructional and other expenditures toward new capital construction using teacher contracts i show that collectively bargained salaries are largely unresponsive to competition and that declines in instructional spending are primarily due to decreases in the number of employed teachers competition depresses appraised housing valuations in turn causing tpsds to lose property tax revenues resulting in a decline in overall spending

methodical madness technical analysis and the irrationality of exchange rate forecasts substantial empirical research documents that exchange rate forecasts are not formed rationally this paper identifies a common technical trading signal the head and shoulders pattern as a potential source of departures from rationality in exchange rate forecasts forecasts based on this pattern are evaluated for daily dollar exchange rates over 1973 to 1994 using two criteria for rationality profitability and efficiency resulting profits replicable in real time are tested for statistical significance using a bootstrap technique we find that the rule is profitable but not efficient since it is dominated by simpler trading rules

intraday technical trading in the foreign exchange market this paper examines the out of sample performance of intraday technical trading strategies selected using two methodologies a genetic program and an optimized linear forecasting model when realistic transaction costs and trading hours are taken into account we find no evidence of excess returns to the trading rules derived with either methodology thus our results are consistent with market efficiency we do however find that the trading rules discover some remarkably stable patterns in the data

forecasting foreign exchange rates with an intrinsically nonlinear dynamic speed of adjustment model forecasting foreign exchange rates is an important but difficult process therefore it is important to use a superior forecasting model the paper takes up this criterion and proposes to describe and forecast foreign exchange rates by developing an intrinsically nonlinear model with variable and dynamic speeds of adjustment it is found that the speed of adjusting the random or expected to the equilibrium rate is very slow implying that fiscal policy statistically insignificat and monetary policy statistically significant may be ineffective to induce changes in the adjustment speed we also find that the nonlinear dynamic model improves forecasting performance implying that nonlinearities in the sense of functional forms are exploitable for improved point forecasting of foreign exchange rates

every minute counts in financial markets abstract this paper represents an introductory study of ultra high frequency minuute by minute data for forex spot rates bid ask reuters quotes on three days autumn 1987 the frequency of price revision size of spread and statistical characteristics are measured the series exhibit time varying leptokurtosis unit roots and first order negative correlation the latter especially in disturbed jumpy markets the effect of time aggregation on these characteristics is examined and variance ratios are analyzed multivariate analysis revealed significant relationships between lagged exchange rates both the own rate and the key deutsche mark us dollar rate and the current spot rate

trading patterns and prices in the interbank foreign exchange market the behavior of quote arrivals and bid ask spreads is examined for continuously recorded deutsche mark dollar exchange rate data over time across locations and by market participants a pattern in the intraday spread and intensity of market activity over time is uncovered and related to theories of trading patterns models for the conditional mean and variance of returns and bid ask spreads indicate volatility clustering at high frequencies the proposition that trading intensity has an independent effect on returns volatility is rejected but holds for spread volatility conditional returns volatility is increasing in the size of the spread there is a growing body of theoretical studies on the pattern of trading activity in financial markets with implications for the time series behavior of transactions prices and intensity of trading the empirical literature addressing similar concerns using intraday market data appropriate for such tasks is sparse particularly in the area of the trading of currencies the purpose of this paper is to examine both international patterns of intraday trading activity and the time series properties of returns and bid ask spreads for the deutsche mark dollar exchange rate in the interbank foreign exchange market the goal is to provide information useful in the further development of market microstructure models of trading and to compare empirical findings against theoretical results already in existence the foreign exchange market is in operation twenty four hours a day seven

day of the week effects and asset returns the number of empirical studies using daily stock returns is rapidly increasing researchers generally assume that the distribution of stock returns is identical for all days of the week a convenient statistical assumption but not a necessary condition of market equilibrium nevertheless there are reasons to suspect that the distribution of returns may vary according to the day of the week the most obvious is the impact of weekends on monday s return since monday s return is calculated over three instead of one calender day the mean and variance may well be higher on monday compared with any other daily return perhaps three times as large previous research has examined the daily distribution of stock returns for a monday effect while fama 1965 does not compare daily mean returns he does report that monday s variance is about 20o greater than other daily returns with a traditional distributional assumption regarding the returns on a financial asset specifies that the expected returns are identical for all days of the week contrary to this plausible assumption this paper discovers that the expected returns on common stocks and treasury bills are not constant across days of the week the most notable evidence is for monday s returns where the mean is unusually low or even negative several explanations of the results are investigated but none proves satisfactory aside from documenting significant day of the week effects the implications of the results for tests of market efficiency are examined while market adjusted returns continue to exhibit day of the week effects these effects are no longer concentrated on monday during the last year we have had many conversations with our colleagues throughout the professions we are particularly thankful to the participants at sessions of the western and american finance associations where preliminary versions of this paper were presented special thanks are due to gene fama gailen hite jon ingersoll robert jarrow merton miller clifford smith and rex thompson the expert research assistance of frank rabinovitch and youngsup yun is gratefully acknowledged 1 the list of papers using daily stock returns is too long to name recent examples include charest 1978 dodd 1980 banz 1981 and reinganum 1981

the behavior of foreign exchange rates the analysis of the distribution of foreign exchange rate changes provides a description of the behavior of foreign exchange rates and its determining underlying process the application of empirical methodologies or further theoretical developments is limited by the nature of this distribution in this paper the empirical analysis of major currencies during the flexible exchange rate period suggests that there is no unique distribution representing the behavior of the foreign exchange rate this however is determined both by foreign exchange management policies and the fundamental economic forces

interest rate volatility and the term structure a two factor general equilibrium model we develop a two factor general equilibrium model of the term structure the factors are the short term interest rate and the volatility of the short term interest rate we derive closed form expressions for discount bonds and study the properties of the term structure implied by the model the dependence of yields on volatility allows the model to capture many observed properties of the term structure we also derive closed form expressions for discount bond options we use hansen s generalized method of moments framework to test the cross sectional restrictions imposed by the model the tests support the two factor model there are essentially two approaches to the modeling of the term structure of interest rates in continuous time the equilibrium approach pioneered by

modelling the link between commodity prices and exchange rates the tale of daily data this paper examines daily data on exchange rates and the prices of three commodities traded on the winnipeg commodity exchange the temporal patterns of commodity prices and exchange rates are shown to be similar daily data are significantly non normal with garch models capturing the processes generating the data commodity prices and exchange rates are examined for cointegration using recent tests proposed by johansen and juselius 1990 currency depreciation is shown to granger cause commodity price inflation this information might be useful to central bankers concerned with reducing general price inflation through targeting commodity price inflation it also suggests that macro events have important effects on commodity markets in canada

fiscal policy banks and the financial crisis this paper studies the effectiveness of euro area ea fiscal policy during the recent financial crisis using an estimated new keynesian model with a bank a key dimension of policy in the crisis was massive government support for banks that dimension has so far received little attention in the macroeconomics literature we use the estimated model to analyze the effects of bank asset losses of government support for banks and other fiscal stimulus measures in the ea our results suggest that support for banks had a stabilizing effect on ea output consumption and investment increased government purchases helped to stabilize output but crowded out consumption higher transfers to households had a positive impact on private consumption but a negligible effect on output and investment banking shocks and increased government spending explain half of the rise in the public debt gdp ratio since the onset of the crisis

limited asset market participation and the euro area crisis an empirical dsge model we estimate a medium scale dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for the euro area with limited asset market participation lamp our results suggest that in the recent european monetary union years lamp is particularly sizable 39 during 1993 2012 and important to understand business cycle features the bayes factor and the forecasting performance show that the lamp model is preferred to its representative household counterpart in the representative agent model the risk premium shock is the main driver of output volatility in order to match consumption correlation with output in the lamp model this role is played by the investment specific shock because non ricardian households introduce a keynesian multiplier effect and raise the correlation between consumption and investments we also detect the contractionary role of monetary policy shocks during the post 2007 years in this period consumption of non ricardian households fell dramatically but this outcome might have been avoided by a more aggressive policy stance jel c11 c13 c32 e21 e32 e37

the influence of fundamentals on exchange rates findings from analyses of news effects as we survey the literature of macroeconomic news in the foreign exchange market we can by now look back on nearly 30 years of research the first studies which analysed news effects on exchange rates were established in the early 1990s see for example dornbusch almost at the same time meese and rogoff published their influential paper revealing the forecasting inferiority in exchange rates of structural models against the random walk this finding has shocked the pillars of exchange rate economics and thus cast general suspicion on research focusing on fundamentals in this field the eventual rising popularity of event studies can partly be attributed to the re establishment of the raison d etre of exchange rate economics this work focuses on systematically surveying this literature with particular respect to its primary goal i e shedding light on the analytical value of fundamental research thus its major findings are first fundamental news does matter whereas non fundamental news matters to a lesser degree second news influences exchange rates via two separated channels i e incorporating common information into prices directly or indirectly based upon order flow third with a few exceptions the impact of fundamental news on exchange rates is fairly stable over time

the effect of charter schools on achievement and behavior of public school students abstract charter schools have seen dramatic growth over the last decade however we know little about how they affect traditional public schools i look at how charters affect student outcomes in public schools using data from a large urban school district in the southwest unlike prior work that relies on school fixed effects i address the endogenous location of charter schools using an instrumental variables strategy that relies on plausibly exogenous variation in local building supply results show that charters induce modest but statistically significant drops in math and language test scores particularly for elementary students however results for middle and high school students show improvements in discipline

the statistical properties of daily foreign exchange rates 1974 1983 abstract this paper examines the statistical properties of daily rates of change of five foreign currencies from 1974 to 1983 the main purpose is to discriminate between two competing explanations for the observed heavy tails of the distribution that the data are independently drawn from a heavy tail distribution which remains fixed over time and that the data come from distributions which vary over time evidence point to the rejection of the first hypothesis further investigations show that the rejection can be attributed to changing means and variances in the data which can be described by a simple statistical model

news effects in a high frequency model of the sterling dollar exchange rate this paper uses an extremely high frequency data set on the dollar sterllng exchange rate to investigate the impact of news events on the very short term movements in exchange rates the data set is a continuous record of the quoted price for the exchange rate on the reuters screen as such it records some 130 000 observations over an 8 week period the paper investigates the time series properties of the data using orthodox regression models and then by making allowance for a time varying conditional variance the conclusions vary significantly in moving to this more sophisticated model the exercises are repeated now incorporating news announcement effects letting these affect the level of the exchange rate and then the conditional variance process again it is found that the conclusions are radically altered in moving to the increasingly sophisticated model

keynesian government spending multipliers and spillovers in the euro area the global financial crisis has led to a renewed interest in discretionary fiscal stimulus advocates of discretionary measures emphasize that government spending can stimulate additional private spending the keynesian multiplier effect thus we investigate whether the spending package announced by euro area governments for 2009 and 2010 is likely to boost gdp by more than one for one because of modelling uncertainty it is essential that such policy evaluations be robust to alternative modelling assumptions and parameterizations we use five different empirical macroeconomic models with keynesian features such as price and wage rigidities to evaluate the impact of the fiscal stimulus four of them suggest that the planned increase in government spending will reduce private consumption and investment significantly only a model that largely ignores the forward looking behavioural response of consumers and firms implies crowding in of private spending we review a range of issues that may play a role in the recession of 2008 2009 implementation lags are found to reinforce crowding out and may even cause an initial contraction zero bound effects may lead the central bank to abstain from interest rate hikes and increase the gdp impact of government spending crowding in however requires an immediate anticipation of at least two years at the zero bound using a multi country model we find that spillovers between euro area countries are negligible or even negative because direct demand effects are offset by the indirect effect of a euro appreciation new keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge models provide a strong case for government savings packages announced with sufficient lead time spending cuts induce a significant short run stimulus and crowding in of private spending tobias cwik and volker wieland

a class of nonlinear arch models a class of nonlinear arch models is suggested the proposed class encompasses several functional forms for arch which have been put forth in the literature a lagrange multiplier test is developed to test engle s arch specification against the wider class of models this test provides an easily computed diagnostic check of the adequacy of an arch model after it has been estimated the theory is applied to a number of weekly exchange rate series and we find strong evidence of nonlinear arch

strategic quality choice and charter schools abstract proponents of charter schools argue that competition will improve the educational outcomes of both charter and public students a model of quality choice has been used to examine this claim with capacity constraints there is an equilibrium in which the charter school offers a higher quality which the public school will not match competition from charter schools may therefore have only modest effects on public school quality if any

the inefficiency of reuters foreign exchange quotes abstract reuters foreign exchange fxfx page is the world wide predominant information source to foreign exchange traders in this study we compare the indicative spot exchange rate quotes from reuters with their matching futures exchange rates from the chicago mercantile exchange we find that the indicative quotes on reuters fxfx page are inefficient and could be improved by incorporating information from the futures market this casts doubt on the way banks determine these quotes as well as on the informational content of these quotes as an indicator of the current exchange rate

conditional var estimation using pearson s type iv distribution abstract this paper presents a new value at risk var estimation model for equity returns time series and tests it extensively on stock indices of 14 countries two most important stylized facts of such series are volatility clustering and non normality as a result of fat tails of the return distribution while volatility clustering has been extensively studied using the garch model and its various extensions the phenomenon of non normality has not been comprehensively explored at least in the context of var estimation a combination of extreme value theory evt and garch has been explored to analyze financial data showing non normal behavior this paper proposes a combination of the pearson s type iv distribution and the garch 1 1 approach to furnish a new method with superior predictive abilities the approach is back tested for the entire sample as well as for a holdout sample using rolling windows

a note on weekday intraday and overnight patterns in the interbank foreign exchange and listed currency options markets abstract transactions data are used to investigate returns patterns for close to close close to open and intraday long positions in spot currency interbank and currency put options listed for the years 1983 through 1988 both trading day and calendar day hypotheses are investigated under the former spot market returns are found to be significantly higher from friday close to monday close and from friday close to monday open under the calendar day hypothesis however no significant close to close pattern emerges and the friday close to monday open effect is reversed finally spot put market returns are found to be significantly lower higher for tuesday and friday afternoons

the statistical distribution of exchange rates empirical evidence and economic implications the abundant evidence that changes in exchange rates have distributions with fatter tails than the normal distribution has led researchers to consider non normal distributions including the student the stable paretian and mixtures of distributions this paper compares the empirical fits of three non normal candidates and the normal distribution for daily changes in the logarithms of exchange rates using maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters and chi square goodness of fit tests the student and mixture of two normals provide the best fits but there is evidence that the distribution parameters may vary over time

the euro crisis undetected by conventional economics favoured by nationally focused polity this article interprets the initial success of the launch of the euro and its muddling through since the outbreak of the greek sovereign debt crisis two interrelated processes interacted to deliver a quite complex idiosyncratic systemic crisis first new classical macroeconomics had diffused the belief that market economies are structurally stable money is neutral financial markets are efficient and that the only culprit is public finance the euro crisis was thus inaccurately diagnosed second in the political arena monetary integration has been used by many governments as a justification for liberalisation reforms opposed by various domestic social groups at the european level most governments have been defending national interests whereas the european commission and european parliament had lost most of their expertise and legitimacy in defending a common community in line euro ambitions crisis resolution calls for leadership from a key collective actor to return coherence to the eurozone s institutional setting copyright oxford university press

great recession slow recovery and muted fiscal policies in the us this paper reconsiders the role of macroeconomic shocks and policies in determining the great recession and the subsequent recovery in the us the great recession was mainly caused by a large demand shock and by the zlb on the interest rate policy in contrast with previous findings the subsequent jobless recovery is explained by the zlb effect we estimate a fraction of non ricardian households which is close to 50 and obtain comparatively large fiscal multipliers however we cannot detect a significant contribution of fiscal policies in stabilizing the us economy for instance the 2007 2009 large increase in expenditure to gdp ratios was apparently determined by the adverse non policy shocks that caused the recession

charter school entry and school choice the case of washington d c this paper develops and estimates an equilibrium model of charter school entry and school choice in the model households choose among public private and charter schools and a regulator authorizes charter entry and mandates charter exit the model is estimated for washington d c according to the estimates charters generate net social gains by providing additional school options and they benefit non white low income and middle school students the most further policies that raise the supply of prospective charter entrants in combination with high authorization standards enhance social welfare

the time variation of risk and return in the foreign exchange and stock markets this paper attempts to determine whether the fluctuations of conditional first and second moments which are observed for many assets are consistent with the sharpelintner mossin capital asset pricing model we test the mean variance model under several different assumptions about the time variation of conditional second moments of returns using weekly data from july 1974 to december 1986 that include returns on a portfolio composed of dollar deutsche mark sterling and swiss franc assets together with the u s stock market the results indicate that estimated conditional variances cannot explain the observed time variation of risk premia rates of return on international financial assets are characterized by statistical properties that are quite common to all financial markets they are highly volatile and largely unpredictable these properties make it very difficult to extract statistically reliable estimates of systematic exchange rate and assetprice movements and are at the root of the generally poor empirical performance of international asset pricing models nevertheless two important results have been uncovered by empirical researchers and can be considered a fair characterization of the data a expected returns on foreign assets vary over time cumby and obstfeld 1981 and the numerous articles that followed recently surveyed by frankel and meese 1987 b the volatility of returns of foreign assets also changes over time cumby and obstfeld 1984 hodrick and srivastava 1984 and hsieh 1988 among others as giovannini and jorion 1987 suggest the

testing the martingale hypothesis in deutsche mark futures with models specifying the form of heteroscedasticity summary we examine the form of heteroscedasticity in deutsche mark futures price data and compare different specifications of the particular way that the variance is changing over time the martingale hypothesis is tested with daily and weekly rates of change of futures prices for the deutsche mark and some evidence is found against this hypothesis in analyses of daily data from 1981 to 1985 this rejection of the martingale hypothesis may be attributed to trading day effects in foreign currency prices and the resulting day of the week patterns in futures prices when the martingale hypothesis is tested with weekly data the null hypothesis is retained

deutsche mark dollar volatility intraday activity patterns macroeconomic announcements and longer run dependencies this paper provides a detailed characterization of the volatility in the deutsche mark dollar foreign exchange market using an annual sample of five minute returns the approach captures the intraday activity patterns the macroeconomic announcements and the volatility persistence arch known from daily returns the different features are separately quantified and shown to account for a substantial fraction of return variability both at the intraday and daily level the implications of the results for the interpretation of the fundamental driving forces behind the volatility process is also discussed the efficient market hypothesis contends that financial asset prices provide rational assessments of fundamental values and future payoffs by implication price changes should reflect the arrival and processing of all relevant new information however the proportion of return variability that can be ascribed to public news announcements is low for example cutler poterba and summers 1989 find that even the largest daily price changes in the stock market generally cannot be associated with any significant economic news 1 moreover proxies for the flow of public information e g the number of news items released by reuter s news service berry and hiowe 1994 or dow jones company mitchell and mulherin 1994 explain little of the overall variation thus if private information is ruled out proponents of rational price formation have to assert the existence of important news items

the performance and competitive effects of school autonomy this paper studies a recent british reform that allowed public high schools to opt out of local authority control and become autonomous schools funded directly by the central government schools seeking autonomy had only to propose and win a majority vote among current parents almost one in three high schools voted on autonomy between 1988 and 1997 and using a version of the regression discontinuity design i find large achievement gains at schools in which the vote barely won compared to schools in which it barely lost despite other reforms that ensured that the british education system was by international standards highly competitive a comparison of schools in the geographic neighborhoods of narrow vote winners and narrow vote losers suggests that these gains did not spill over

modeling and measuring intraday overreaction of stock prices abstract we introduce a model for stock prices consisting of a fundamental price process and a news impact curve which allows for either overreaction underreaction or correct response to changes of the fundamental value we further develop statistics based on ohlc data which separately measure upside and downside overreaction the distribution of these statistics under the hypothesis of correct response and fundamental prices following brownian motions is used to derive tests for upside and downside overreaction we show that more realistic and frequently used fundamental price processes with correct response leave the distribution of the test statistics widely unaffected or lead to conservative tests empirical application to different stock markets provides strong evidence for intraday overreaction particularly to bad news the economic significance of the discrimination induced by the proposed statistics is further illustrated by analyzing the performance of a simple buy on bad news strategy

the impact of charter school attendance on student performance abstract we employ a panel of individual student data on math and reading test performance for five cohorts of students in texas to study the impact of charter school attendance we control for school mobility effects and distinguish movement to a charter school from movement within and between traditional public school districts we find students experience poor test score growth in their initial year in a charter school but that this is followed by recovery in the subsequent years failure to account for this pattern may lead to potentially misleading estimates of the impact of charter attendance on student achievement students who remain in charters largely recover from the initial disruption within approximately 3 years and there is weak evidence that there may be overall gains from charter attendance within this period furthermore students who return to traditional public schools after just 1 or 2 years in a charter do not appear to suffer a lasting negative impact despite their poor average performance in their first year of charter attendance

a further investigation of the weekend effect in stock returns this study uses a longer time period and additional stocks to further investigate the weekend effect we find consistently negative monday returns 1 for the s p composite as early as 1928 2 for exchange traded stocks of firms of all sizes and 3 for actively traded over the counter otc stocks the otc results are based on bid prices and therefore appear to reject specialist related explanations for the 30 individual stocks of the dow jones industrial index the average correlation between friday and monday returns is positive and the highest of all pairs of successive days the latter finding is inconsistent with fairly general measurement error explanations some of the most puzzling empirical findings reported in recent years indicate that the distribution of common stock returns varies by day of the week most notably the average return for monday close friday to close monday is significantly negative cross 3 and french 6 find negative monday returns using the standard and poor s composite index and gibbons and hess 7 find negative monday returns for the 30 individual stocks of the dow jones industrial index 1 this negative monday return or weekend effect has yet to be explained this study undertakes a further investigation of the weekend effect in stock returns we examine additional time periods extending the total period covered to 55 years we examine additional stocks such as those of small low capitalization firms and those traded over the counter in all cases the data exhibit a weekend effect that is at least as strong as that reported in previous studies the study also readdresses potential explanations for the effect such as measurement error but concludes that none of these explanations is satisfactory the first section presents a history of the weekend effect from 1928 through 1982 based on the standard and poor s composite index we essentially double the length of the period beginning in 1953 examined by french 6 the results indicate consistently negative monday returns throughout the 55 year period during much of the 25 year period from 1928 through 1952 the new york stock exchange was open on saturdays so monday s return is then computed from saturday s close to monday s close 2 these returns for one day weekends are consistently negative and not significantly different from the two day weekend

some fiscal calculus what is the impact of fiscal policy on the econ omy how large are the multipliers of govern ment spending and tax cuts this old question has recently received considerable attention in par ticular in the context of the american recovery and reinvestment act arra of 2009 i contribute to answering that question by calculating fiscal multipliers in a baseline neo classical growth model with endogenous labor supply and fiscal policy allowing for govern ment spending transfers government debt and distortionary taxes on labor and capital income the policy experiments are conducted holding transfers consumption taxes and capital income taxes fixed i e changes in taxation require changes in the distortionary labor tax the model is simple and fairly standard as an additional contribution i provide the model in an elegant and tractable form starting from a fairly general formulation and pointing out the key functional form properties for characterizing the dynamics the formulation of the model here or versions

cross currency cross maturity forward exchange premiums as predictors of spot rate changes theory and evidence abstract this paper shows that in predicting the spot rate of a currency the term structures of forward premiums of other currencies have incremental information content in addition to the term structure of the currency s own forward premiums the theoretical model motivating the analysis hinges on the abundant evidence on the co movements of excess returns from investing in different currencies the empirical results are obtained through fiml estimation of a vector error correction model for weekly data on three bilateral us dollar exchange rates

why finance ministers favor carbon taxes even if they do not take climate change into account fiscal considerations may shift governmental priorities away from environmental concerns finance ministers face strong demand for public expenditures such as infrastructure investments but they are constrained by international tax competition we develop a multi region model of tax competition and resource extraction to assess the fiscal incentive of imposing a tax on carbon rather than on capital we explicitly model international capital and resource markets as well as intertemporal capital accumulation and resource extraction while fossil resources give rise to scarcity rents capital does not with carbon taxes the rents can be captured and invested in infrastructure which leads to higher welfare than under capital taxation this result holds even without modeling environmental damages it is robust under a variation of the behavioral assumptions of resource importers to coordinate their actions and a resource exporter s ability to counteract carbon policies further no green paradox occurs instead the carbon tax constitutes a viable green policy since it postpones extraction and reduces cumulative emissions

international portfolio diversification the basket peg regime abstract the paper compares and contrasts optimal investment strategies in two alternative monetary arrangements namely in the regime with freely floating bilateral exchange rates and the basket peg system it is shown that in the basket peg arrangement investors can form a domestic currency denominated risk free asset of the foreign risk free assets without entering into the forward currency markets furthermore investors have an incentive to hold fewer assets and the structure of capital flows tends to be more volatile but also more predictable in the basket peg system than in the regime with freely floating bilateral exchange rates

multivariate nearest neighbour forecasts of ems exchange rates exchange rate modelling has been a persistent puzzle for international economists forecasts from popular models for the exchange rate generally fail to improve upon the random walk out of sample while a multivariate nonparametric approach provides useful information about exchange rates the model produces forecasts superior to the random walk for only one of the three ems currencies examined using a statistic developed in mizrach 1991 i find that the forecast improvement a 4 5 percent reduction in mean squared error for the lira in daily returns is not statistically significant a cross validation exercise suggests that the improvement is also not robust

market structure and inefficiency in the foreign exchange market abstract this paper investigates the intradaily operational efficiency of the us foreign exchange market by conducting computer simulation experiments with market structure the numbers of market makers brokers and customers the results indicate significant operational inefficiencies which can be explained by temporary inventory imbalances inherent in a decentralized market the results also suggest that much of this inefficiency could be alleviated through a centralization of price information jel f31 g15

the intraday bid ask spread behaviour of the jpy usd exchange rate in the ebs electronic brokerage system using a sophisticated tool of the periodic generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic p garch model this article investigates the market institutional effects of the determining role of trading activities and exchange rate volatility on the intraday behaviour of the 15 minute jpy usd exchange rate bid ask spreads in the electronic broking service ebs of electronic brokerage market for the period from 1 january 2003 to 31 december 2005 we find that the exchange rate volatility both significantly and positively affects the bid ask spreads while the number of deals and quotation changes negatively affect the bid ask spreads these results are similar to those of past studies we also find that a u shaped pattern exists in the tokyo trading hours and an inverted u shaped pattern in the london trading hours in addition to a round clock inverted u shaped pattern of spread volatility this inverted u shaped pattern may be caused by unexpected news arrivals the spread behaviour of the ebs glo

a flexible parametric garch model with an application to exchange rates many asset prices including exchange rates exhibit periods of stability punctuated by infrequent substantial often one sided adjustments statistically this generates empirical distributions of exchange rate changes that exhibit high peaks long tails and skewness this paper introduces a garch model with a flexible parametric error distribution based on the exponential generalized beta egb family of distributions applied to daily us dollar exchange rate data for six major currencies evidence based on a comparison of actual and predicted higher order moments and goodness of fit tests favours the garch egb2 model over more conventional garch t and egarch t model alternatives particularly for exchange rate data characterized by skewness copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

choice of ontario high schools and student sorting by ability to what extent can offering more choice in schooling lead to cream skimming or the sorting of students by ability i study whether increased choice leads to student sorting by ability into high schools in the greater toronto area on average 41 of students opt out of the high school to which they would normally be assigned based on their residence students are more likely to opt out in areas where accessibility to other schools is greatest due to population density and explicit open enrolment policies while students of higher ability are generally more likely to opt out an interaction term between school choice and ability is insignificant suggesting that increased choice does not have differential impacts by student ability findings are robust to changes in assumptions about instrument exogeneity

trading rule profits in european currency spot cross rates abstract the moving average ma trading rule is applied to six european spot cross rates jy bp dm bp jy dm sf dm sf bp and jy sf to see if opportunities for profitable trading exist the results suggest that ma trading rules are marginally profitable only for the jy dm and the jy sf cross rates while trading rules are not profitable for the other four cross rates bootstrapping and out of sample tests provide similar results examination of subsamples characterized by central bank intervention do not produce different results computation of box pierce statistics adjusted for heteroscedasticity show that daily returns for all six cross rates are serially uncorrelated overall the results suggests that cross rates are sufficiently transparent to eliminate ma trading rule profit

forecasting exchange rate volatility using conditional variance models selected by information criteria this paper uses appropriately modified information criteria to select models from the garch family which are subsequently used for predicting us dollar exchange rate return volatility the out of sample forecast accuracy of models chosen in this manner compares favourably on mean absolute error grounds although less favourably on mean squared error grounds with those generated by the commonly used garch 1 1 model an examination of the orders of models selected by the criteria reveals that 1 1 models are typically selected less than 20 of the time

arch models properties estimation and testing abstract the aim of this survey paper is to provide an account of some of the important developments in the autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity arch model since its inception in a seminal paper by engle 1982 this model takes account of many observed properties of asset prices and therefore various interpretations can be attributed to it we start with the basic arch models and discuss their different interpretations arch models have been generalized in different directions to accommodate more and more features of the real world we provide a comprehensive treatment of many of the extensions of the original arch model next we discuss estimation and testing for arch models and note that these models lead to some interesting and unique problems there have been numerous applications and we mention some of these as we present different models the paper includes a glossary of the acronyms for the models we describe

negative autocorrelation around large jumps in intra day foreign exchange data abstract this paper addresses the issue of first order negative autocorrelation around large changes in high frequency foreign exchange rate data this phenomenon is found to exist at smaller time horizons and disappear at larger horizons

some evidence of random walk behavior of euro exchange rates using ranks and signs abstract this study utilises recently developed tests based on ranks and signs in addition to the traditional variance ratio test to examine the behavior of euro exchange rates we show that adjustments for multiple tests must be employed in order to avoid size distortions overall such adjustments provide evidence consistent with random walk behavior of euro exchange rates

price discovery in the foreign exchange market an empirical analysis of the yen dmark rate abstract using reuters exchange rate data we investigate the dynamic relations between the direct quotes of the yen dmark rate and the rate implied by yen dollar and dmark dollar rates since these high frequency data are observed at irregular intervals technical problems arise in calculating auto correlations and cross correlations we propose a covariance estimator for irregularly spaced data the empirical results show lagged adjustment of the direct yen dmark cross rate to changes in the dollar implied rate however since the dollar implied rate is extremely noisy substantial price discovery takes place through the direct yen dmark market especially during the most busy parts of the day

on jump processes in the foreign exchange and stock markets exchange rates exhibit systematic discontinuities even after allowingfor conditional heteroskedasticity in the diffusion process the results are much more significant in theforeign exchange market than in the stock market which suggests differences in the structure of these markets finally this jump component is shown to explain some of the empirically observed mispricings in the currency options market the objective of this article is to analyze and compare the empirical distribution of returns in the stock market and in the foreign exchange market there are a number of reasons why a better understanding of the stochastic processes driving prices in these markets would be useful many financial models rely heavily on the assumption of a particular stochastic process while relatively little attention is paid to the empirical fit of the postulated distribution as a result models like option pricing models are applied indiscriminately to various markets such as the stock market and the foreign exchange market when the underlying processes may be fundamentally different the foreign exchange market for instance is characterized by active exchange rate man

a prudential stable funding requirement and monetary policy in a small open economy abstract the basel iii net stable funding requirement introduced in january 2018 requires banks to use a minimum share of long term wholesale funding and deposits to fund their assets a similar regulation has been in place in new zealand since 2010 we introduce the stable funding requirement sfr into an open economy dsge model featuring a banking sector with richly specified liabilities and estimate the model for new zealand we then evaluate the impact of the new prudential instrument on monetary policy trade offs a higher steady state sfr level amplifies the effects of shocks to the spread on long term bond financing in the banking sector adding to macroeconomic volatility conditional on these shocks however the sfr plays a passive role in the transmission of all other shocks to the real economy hence in the overall picture the monetary policy trade off between inflation stabilisation and output stabilisation is only slightly worsened by the sfr we note that the trade off can be improved when monetary policy responds systematically to credit growth

tax reform and labour market performance in the euro area a simulation based analysis using the new area wide model in this paper we employ a calibrated two country version of the new area wide model nawm developed at the european central bank to examine the potential benefits and spillovers of reducing labour market distortions caused by euro area tax structures our analysis shows that lowering tax distortions to levels prevailing in the united states would result in an increase in hours worked and output by more than 10 at the same time tax reductions would have positive spillovers to the euro area s trade partners bolstering the case for tax reforms from a global perspective finally we illustrate that in the presence of heterogeneous households distributional effects may be of importance when gauging the impact of tax reforms

the savers spenders theory of fiscal policy the macroeconomic analysis of fiscal policy is usually based on one of two canonical models the barro ramsey model of infinitely lived families or the diamond samuelson model of overlapping generations this paper argues that neither model is satisfactory and suggests an alternative in the proposed model some consumers plan ahead for themselves and their descendants while others live paycheck to paycheck this model is easier to reconcile with the essential facts about consumer behavior and wealth accumulation and it yields some new and surprising conclusions about fiscal policy

the laffer curve revisited abstract laffer curves for the us the eu 14 and individual european countries are compared using a neoclassical growth model featuring constant frisch elasticity cfe preferences new tax rate data is provided the us can maximally increase tax revenues by 30 with labor taxes and 6 with capital taxes we obtain 8 and 1 for the eu 14 there 54 of a labor tax cut and 79 of a capital tax cut are self financing the consumption tax laffer curve does not peak endogenous growth and human capital accumulation affect the results quantitatively household heterogeneity may not be important while transition matters greatly

short run fluctuations in foreign exchange rates evidence from the data 1973 1979 abstract the paper examines the statistical properties of daily changes in foreign exchange fx rates for nine currencies it finds that these changes are leptokurtotic i e have long tailed and sharp peaked histograms the evidence suggests that this leptokurtosis does not arise from an underlying paretian stable distribution nor from a stationary mixture of normal distributions but rather from normal processes with time varying parameters this finding casts doubt on the validity of many standard techniques t stats arima methods some moving statistics for estimating the time varying parameters are also presented

implied exchange rate distributions evidence from otc option markets abstract this paper uses a rich new dataset of option prices on the dollar mark dollar yen and key ems cross rates to extract the entire risk neutral probability density function pdf over horizons of 1 and 3 months we compare three alternative smoothing methods cubic splines an implied binomial tree trimmed and untrimmed and a mixture of lognormals for transforming option data into the pdf despite their methodological differences the three approaches lead to a similar pdf clearly distinct from the lognormal benchmark and typically characterized by skewness and leptokurtosis we then document a striking positive correlation between skewness in these pdfs and the spot rate the stronger a currency the more expectations are skewed towards a further appreciation of that currency we interpret this finding as a rejection that innovations in these exchange rates are independent of the level or characteristic of a credible target zone explicit or implicit instead this positive correlation is consistent with target zones with endogenous realignment risk we discuss two interpretations of our results on skewness when a currency is stronger the actual probability of further large appreciation is higher or because of risk such states are valued more highly

catching the wave alertness responsiveness and market influence in global electronic networks this paper introduces the concepts of alertness and responsiveness as key capabilities for firms in fast moving information intensive environments such as global currency trading hypotheses drawn from the resource based view of the firm from network theory and from austrian economics are tested on objective cross section and time series data for the population of 4 088 banks engaged in foreign exchange trading on the reuters dealing system results strongly support the hypotheses that banks that are alert i e use their information networks in ways that expand the range of information they are exposed to and responsive those that act quickly in volatile markets tend to exercise greater market influence in this industry

central bank intervention and exchange rate volatility abstract this paper explores the effects of foreign exchange intervention by central banks on the behavior of exchange rates the g 3 central banks have undertaken an unprecedented number of both coordinated and unilateral intervention operations in the last 10 years existing empirical evidence on the effectiveness of intervention is mixed studies using data from the 1970s suggest that intervention operations that do not affect the monetary base have at most a short lived influence on exchange rates but more recent studies indicate that the intervention operations that followed the plaza agreement influenced both the level and variance of exchange rates this paper examines the effects of us german and japanese monetary and intervention policies on dollar mark and dollar yen exchange rate volatility over the 1977 1994 period the results indicate that intervention operations generally increase exchange rate volatility this is particularly true of secret interventions which are those undertaken by central banks without notification of the public overt interventions in the mid 1980s appear to have reduced exchange rate volatility but in other periods and for the 1977 1994 period as a whole central bank intervention is associated with greater exchange rate volatility

introducing financial frictions and unemployment into a small open economy model the current nancial crisis has made it abundantly clear that business cycle modeling no longer can abstract from nancial factors it is also becoming increasingly clear that the stylized modeling of labor markets without explicit unemployment that is the current standard approach has its limitations some questions which the dominating extant business cycle models are mute on but that we would like to answer are how important are nancial and labor market frictions for the business cycle dynamics of a

the persistence of volatility and stock market fluctuations this paper examines the potential influence of changing volatility in stock market prices on the level of stock market prices it demonstrates that volatility is only weakly serially correlated implying that shocks to volatility do not persist these shocks can therefore have only a small impact on stockmarket prices since changes in volatility affect expected required rates of return for relatively short intervals these findings lead us to be skeptical of recent claims that the stock market s poor performance during the 1970 s can be explained by volatility induced increases in risk premia this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

exchange rates and fundamentals co movement long run relationships and short run dynamics abstract the present study builds upon the seminal work of engel and west 2005 and in particular on the relationship between exchange rates and fundamentals the paper discusses the well known puzzle that fundamental variables such as money supply and interest rate provide help in predicting changes in floating rates it also tests the theoretical result of engel and west 2005 that in a rational expectations present value model the asset price manifests near random walk behaviour if the fundamentals are i 1 and the factor for discounting future fundamentals is near one the study explores the direction and nature of causal interdependencies among the most widely traded currencies in the world their country specific fundamentals and their us differentials a new var vecm garch multivariate filtering approach is implemented whilst linear and nonlinear non causality is tested and validated on simulated and empirical data the evidence implies that there is no indication of a prevailing causal behaviour and when nonlinear effects are accounted for the pattern of leads and lags changes over time the variations in this linkage can be attributed to parameter instability in structural models which may have little effect on fx forecastability over short horizons yet it is significant for long run cointegrating relationships while it is difficult to reconcile these findings with the rational expectations hypothesis the theory of consistent expectations or bounded rationality matches simulation and empirical findings more efficiently overall fundamentals may be important determinants of fx rates however there may be some other unobservable variables driving the currency rates that current asset pricing models have not yet captured

fiscal policy shocks and stock prices in the united states this paper uses a range of structural vars to show that the response of us stock prices to fiscal shocks changed in 1980 over the period 1955 1980 an expansionary spending or revenue shock was associated with modestly higher stock prices after 1980 along with a decline in the fiscal multiplier the response of stock prices to the same shock became negative and larger in magnitude we use an estimated dsge model to show that this change is consistent with a switch from an economy characterised by active fiscal policy and passive monetary policy to one where fiscal policy was passive and the central bank acted aggressively in response to inflationary shocks

can public spending boost private consumption this paper analyses the effects on private consumption from an increase in productive and unproductive public spending a new keynesian model incorporating price and wage rigidities monetary policy and various fiscal rules is developed and estimated using bayesian techniques to capture the key cyclical characteristics of the us economy we find that price and wage rigidities along with a positive shock to the part of public spending that is productive are suficient to boost private consumption moreover we show that this initial positive reaction of private consumption is adequate to create a positive present value consumption multiplier for more than five years finally we show that our main results remain robust to changes in the monetary rule and the various methods of deficit financing

trading activity dealer concentration and foreign exchange market quality abstract we study the relation between foreign exchange market quality and both trading activity and dealer concentration by considering two currency pairs with significant differences along both dimensions the euro us dollar and canadian dollar us dollar a variance ratio test reveals over reaction in currency prices but that this is smallest when trading activity is high and dealer concentration at its peak a garch model shows that over reaction declines as trading activity and dealer concentration increase with the results being stronger for the euro our results confirm that trading activity is an important determinant of market quality but also point to a significant role for dealer concentration

fiscal policy and the great recession in the euro area how much did fiscal policy contribute to euro area real gdp growth during the great recession we estimate that discretionary fiscal measures have increased annualized quarterly real gdp growth during the crisis by up to 1 6 percentage points we obtain our result by using an extended version of the european central bank s new area wide model with a rich specification of the fiscal sector a detailed modeling of the fiscal sector and the incorporation of as many as eight fiscal time series appear pivotal for our result

a note on intraday foreign exchange volatility and the informational role of quote arrivals abstract the conditional variance for five different hourly foreign exchange rates is modeled using a garch model with the number of incoming quotes as a regressor in the conditional variance equation we find that the number of quotes is positively and significantly related to the volatility of all rates examined the empirical findings support the conjecture of a time consuming information process

does comovement among exchange rates imply market inefficiency abstract this paper argues that contrary to what has been reported in the empirical literature previously cointegration between pairs of exchange rates does not necessarily rule out informational efficiency in currency markets the basic reason is that market efficiency does not rule out predictable exchange rate movements but only rules out arbitrage opportunities from predictable exchange rate movements as the usual parity conditions dictate

seasonality in foreign exchange volatility the paper reports further empirical evidence on seasonality in foreign exchange volatility using high frequency data using a basis of the signal plus noise framework the approach decomposes tick by tick reuters fxfx quotes into a random walk and a stationary component termed the efficient price and the pricing error respectively the efficient price is not directly observable and is an approximation of the true value the pricing error captures the deviation between the observed indicative quote and the efficient price under the proposed model daily and intraday volatilities of the efficient price are estimated a pronounced pattern of volatility is uncovered and appears related to the daily activity cycle of major organized stock exchanges it is argued that seasonality in volatility is a symptom of foreign exchange markets results confirm andersen and bollerslev s findings that significant seasonal effects are one important determinant of overall volatility at high frequencies

new keynesian versus old keynesian government spending multipliers renewed interest in fiscal policy has increased the use of quantitative models to evaluate policy because of modelling uncertainty it is essential that policy evaluations be robust to alternative assumptions we find that models currently being used in practice to evaluate fiscal policy stimulus proposals are not robust government spending multipliers in an alternative empirically estimated and widely cited new keynesian model are much smaller than in these old keynesian models the estimated stimulus is extremely small with gdp and employment effects only one sixth as large and with private sector employment impacts likely to be even smaller we investigate the sensitivity of our findings with regard to the response of monetary policy the zero bound on nominal interest rates and the inclusion of an empirically relevant degree of rule of thumb behaviour in the new keynesian model in addition we relate our findings using estimated structural macroeconomic models to the recent literature using reduced form regression techniques

robust non parametric measures of exchange rate variability changes in exchange rates are well known to possess non gaussian distributions yet in testing for differences in exchange rate volatility few researches have examined measures that do not assume gaussian data this paper develops a robust non parametric measure for comparing exchange rate variability across time the measures are applied to monthly exchange rate data to test for differences in exchange rate variability across different monetary policy regimes the comparison show inconsistencies between conclusions based on the classical f test and the robust non parametric equivalent using the robust test for changes in exchange rate variability we do not conclude that variability has increased over time increases in variability do occur but usually only in specific percentiles of the data

does fomc news increase global fx trading does global currency volume increase on federal open market committee fomc days to test hypotheses of abnormal currency volume on fomc days a new data set from the continuous linked settlement cls bank is used the cls measure captures more than half of the global trading volume in foreign exchange fx markets the evidence shows that fx trading volume increases about 5 in the spot and the spot next market following fomc deliberations the novelty of this result is that the aggregated cls data controls for responses in various derivatives markets a feature that existing studies based on intradaily data for specific trading platforms do not consider

conditional variance and the risk premium in the foreign exchange market abstract we investigate the existence of a risk premium in the foreign exchange market based on the conditional variance of market forecast errors the forecast errors are assumed to follow the arch process introduced by engle 1982 estimation and diagnostic testing of the model are discussed and results are presented for the currencies of the united kingdom france germany japan and switzerland