aggregate price indexes cointegration and tests of the purchasing power parity hypothesis abstract in this paper i show that cointegration tests of ppp using aggregate price indexes are not always robust to changes in relative prices i offer a method of gauging the importance of these effects and find them to be unimportant in recent rejections of ppp

threshold cointegration and purchasing power parity in the pacific nations the paper uses a threshold cointegration methodology to explore the properties of long run purchasing power parity ppp in the pacific nations using japan and the usa as base countries it is shown that long run ppp holds for most asian countries but that the adjustment mechanism is asymmetric in contrast to symmetric error correction models it is found that asymmetric adjustments of nominal exchange rates play an important role in eliminating deviations from long run ppp

tests for symmetric and asymmetric nonlinear mean reversion in real exchange rates new tests based on smooth transition autoregressive models for mean reversion in time series of real exchange rates are proposed one test forces mean reversion to be symmetric about the integrated process central case while the other permits asymmetry the tests are applied to monthly series of seventeen real exchange rates against the u s dollar and fourteen against the deutsche mark they reveal stronger evidence against the unit root null hypothesis than does the usual dickey fuller test

beyond the purchasing power parity testing for cointegration and causality between exchange rates prices and interest rates abstract this paper reexamines the causality between the dollar and the yen in a multivariate framework with the aid of cointegration and error correcting modeling for the 1951 94 period the phillips perron tests and johansen s tests are performed while causality from interest rates to exchange rates is found in the short run no causality between prices and exchange rates is found in the short run however causality is found running from relative prices to exchange rates along with interest rates between the u s and japan in the long run which supports the long run ppp hypothesis

deviations from purchasing power parity in the long run this paper demonstrates that deviations from purchasing power parity reveal a remarkable and possibly startling consistency with martingale behavior during both fixed and flexible rate periods for a wide variety of countries and in both monthly and annual data since this pattern appears to be much more general than one would expect on the basis of models founded on international commodity arbitrage the paper proposes an alternative explanation which instead relies on financial arbitrage in bonds as the underlying mechanism this paper will demonstrate that deviations from purchasing power parity ppp reveal a remarkable and possibly startling consistency with martingale behavior during both fixed and flexible exchange rate periods for a wide variety of countries and in both monthly and annual data this pattern appears to be much more general than one would expect on the basis of models founded on international commodity arbitrage the paper therefore proposes an alternative explanation which does not presuppose free trade in goods but which instead relies on financial arbitrage in bonds as the underlying mechanism the major implication of the theory and the results is that ppp is as likely to be violated in the long as in the short run as an empirical matter deviations from ppp can be observed for most currencies at any instant see kravis et al 21 stockman 37 and genberg 15 among others these deviations are typically both cumulative and persistent the real exchange rate can remain on either side of parity for lengthy but variable time intervals of a year or more as a consequence the current consensus shared

econometric testing of purchasing power parity in less developed countries fixed and flexible exchange rate regime experiences we investigate the purchasing power parity ppp hypothesis for 16 less developed countries ldcs from all over the world during their fixed and flexible exchange rate experiences over the period 1957 01 1999 12 the main contribution of this article to the empirical literature on ppp is that our study is the first to consider ppp hypothesis on alternative exchange rate regimes for ldcs the bilateral exchange rates of ldcs and the united states and their respective price levels are considered three different time series methodologies are employed unit root tests engle granger 1987 cointegration technique and johansen multivariate var methodology 1988 the cointegration techniques improve the results which allows the examination of the more frequent long run relationship between relative prices and nominal exchange rates nevertheless using each of econometric techniques we find only a few and a nearly equal evidence in favour of ppp under the alternative regimes in ldcs hence the main conc

transitory and permanent disturbances and the current account an empirical analysis in the intertemporal framework the intertemporal models of current account determination demonstrate that in the analysis of the current account balance of a country it is important to distinguish between transitory and permanent disturbances in income and relative prices this paper attempts to decompose the observed data on income and real exchange rate into transitory and permanent components and then uses the decomposed series to test the empirical validity of the predictions of the intertemporal models evidence from the united states and japan provide very limited support for the intertemporal models in terms of the effects of transitory and permanent changes in income on current account balance for both us and japan the study finds that permanent changes in real exchange rate have significant effects on the current account balance statistical tests find no evidence of hysteresis in the trading relations of the two countries

some methodological problems with the neoclassical analysis of the east asian miracle this paper discusses the recent controversy over the sources of economic growth in east asia this empirical work has either used growth accounting or estimated econometrically aggregate production functions it is shown that it is possible to approximate the value added accounting identity i e value added equals labour s compensation plus total profits by a mathematical expression that has all the properties of a well behaved neoclassical aggregate production function this implies that statistical estimations of putative aggregate production functions can provide no independent evidence as to whether they accurately describe the production technology of the economy or indeed whether the aggregate production function actually exists a corollary is that the conventional measures of the growth of total factor productivity cannot be unambiguously interpreted as an estimate of the rate of technical progress the paper reviews the works of kim and lau and young and in the light of this explains why both analyses and interpretations of the notion of total factor productivity growth as the rate of technical progress are problematical copyright 2003 oxford university press

arima and cointegration tests of ppp under fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes real exchange rates between the united states and its major trading partners were calculated for the bretton woods and flexible exchange rate periods unit root tests indicate that purchasing power parity performed poorly in both periods tests for cointegration reveal limited instances in which it is possible to estimate the deviations from ppp as an error correcting model the estimated error correcting models indicate that foreign but not u s prices responded to deviations from ppp frenkel s 1981b finding that purchasing power parity ppp worked better during the 1920s than the 1970s caused considerable controversy for example davutyan and pippenger 1985 contend that the socalled collapse of ppp is a result of an increase in the relative importance of real versus monetary shocks they argue that the 1970s as opposed to the 1920s was characterized by real supply shocks and the international coordination of monetary policies the argument is that ppp did not fail rather there was an increase in the volatility of those factors giving rise to deviations from ppp hakkio 1984 reestimated ppp over the 1920s and 1970s using cross country tests i e sure estimates to improve the efficiency of his estimates he was able to support the hypothesis that ppp worked better in the 1970s than in the 1920s on the other hand papers by adler and lehman 1983 dornbusch 1980 frenkel 1981a junge 1985 and krugman 1978 report findings contrary to the ppp hypothesis moreover kenen and rodrik 1986 find that the volatility of real exchange rates has increased throughout the flexible rate period this paper tries to shed some light on the importance and persistence of the observed deviations from purchasing power parity under alternative exchange rate systems while it is interesting to compare ppp in the 1920s versus the 1970s it is equally useful to compare the 1960s versus the 1970s and 1980s if real supply shocks and lack of monetary coordination are characteristic of the latter period ppp should perform better in the 1960s to illustrate the issues involved consider the following econometric model of relative purchasing power

economics for the future beyond the superorganism abstract our environment and economy are at a crossroads this paper attempts a cohesive narrative on how human evolved behavior money energy economy and the environment fit together humans strive for the same emotional state of our successful ancestors in a resource rich environment we coordinate in groups corporations and nations to maximize financial surplus tethered to energy tethered to carbon at global scales the emergent result of this combination is a mindless energy hungry co2 emitting superorganism under this dynamic we are now behaviorally growth constrained and will use any means possible to avoid facing this reality the farther we kick the can the larger the disconnect between our financial and physical reality becomes the moment of this recalibration will be a watershed time for our culture but could also be the birth of a new systems economics and resultant different ways of living the next 30 years are the time to apply all we ve learned during the past 30 years we ve arrived at a species level conversation

searching for stationarity purchasing power parity under the current float abstract using panel data methods we investigate long run purchasing power parity by testing for unit roots in real exchange rates of industrial countries under the current float the evidence against the unit root hypothesis is stronger for larger than for smaller panels for monthly than for quarterly data and when the german mark rather than the united states dollar is used as the base currency while we find that accounting for serial correlation considerably weakens the evidence against the unit root null the results as a whole are consistent with long run purchasing power parity

economic reforms in india since 1991 has gradualism worked opinions on the causes of india s growth deceleration vary world economic growth was slower in the second half of the 1990s and that would have had some dampening effect but india s dependence on the world economy is not large enough for this to account for the slowdown critics of liberalization have blamed the slowdown on the effect of trade policy reforms on domestic industry however the opposite view is that the slowdown is due not to the effects of reforms but rather to the failure to implement the reforms effectively this in turn is often attributed to india s gradualist approach to reform which has meant a frustratingly slow pace of implementation however even a gradualist pace should be able to achieve significant policy changes over ten years this paper examines india s experience with gradualist reforms from this perspective

purchasing power parity and unit root tests using panel data abstract this paper reports the results of unit root tests for real exchange rates using a panel framework this panel approach provides greatly improved power compared to conventional univariate time series unit root tests we obtain evidence supporting ppp over the recent flexible exchange rate period for g 6 and oecd countries we show explicitly that failure to find such evidence in previous research was due to the low power of the tests

the j curve effect and us agricultural and industrial trade this paper examines the j curve hypothesis for us agricultural and manufactured goods using the shiller lag model the results support the j curve effect for agricultural goods but not for manufactured goods these findings explain why many studies in the literature fail to support the j curve phenomenon there are two explanations for these findings 1 the aggregation bias of data that combine both agricultural and manufactured goods and 2 the country under study is often an industrial nation like the us or japan with a high proportion of manufactured goods in both exports and imports

the term structure of currency carry trade risk premia we nd that average returns to currency carry trades decrease signicantly as the maturity of the foreign bonds increases because investment currencies tend to have small local bond term premia the downward term structure of carry trade risk premia is informative about the temporal nature of risks that investors face in currency markets we show that long maturity currency risk premia only depend on the domestic and foreign permanent components of the pricing kernels since transitory currency risk is automatically hedged by interest rate risk for long maturity bonds our

real exchange rate behavior abstract using random simulations with artificial data with identical sample characteristics to the long sample exchange rate data employed by lothian and taylor lothian j r and taylor m p 1996 the recent float from the perspective of the past two centuries journal of political economy 104 488 509 we show that standard unit root tests have extremely low power over sample sizes corresponding to the recent float the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis when it is false is extremely low with 20 years or even 50 years of data and only reaches an acceptable level over much longer spans

policy convergence the exchange rate mechanism and the misalignment of exchange rates some tests of purchasing power parity and generalized purchasing power parity the paper focuses on the convergence issues and the long run credibility of the european monetary system ems and more specifically on the evaluation of the effectiveness of the exchange rate mechanism erm in generating a stabilizing effect on real exchange rates across member countries for this purpose we execute some tests of long run purchasing power parity ppp for an erm group and a non erm group of countries using both the engle and granger procedure and the more powerful johansen cointegration technique we also execute a test of generalized ppp exploiting an idea developed by enders and hurn testing for ppp in a multicountry setting may be a useful methodology to identify the optimal currency area suggested by the data generation process on the basis of the reported homogeneity of real exchange rate behaviour of the countries considered

mean reversion in g 10 nominal exchange rates according to conventional wisdom industrial country floating exchange rates contain unit roots sur tests on panels of monthly group of ten g 10 log nominal rates reject the null of unit roots for various samples over the current float with significance levels from 0 5 to 15 on average in out of sample forecasts mean reversion models beat random walks significantly in some forecast periods for monthly data the range of expected usd dem appreciation rates exceeds 15 per year in the mean reversion model mean reversion places strong restrictions on international models over the sample period the g 10 had to run monetary policies consistent with stable long run nominal rates