harvests and business cycles in nineteenth century america most major american industrial business cycles from around 1880 to the first world war were caused by fluctuations in the size of the cotton harvest due to economically exogenous factors such as weather wheat and corn harvests did not affect industrial production nor did the cotton harvest before the late 1870s the unique effect of the cotton harvest in this period can be explained as an essentially monetary phenomenon the result of interactions between harvests international gold flows and high powered money demand under america s goldstandard regime of 1879 1914

mean reversion in real exchange rates evidence and implications for forecasting abstract the stationarity of real exchange rates over the recent flexible exchange rate period is an issue that has long bedeviled researchers in international finance using a constrained multivariate framework this paper provides the strongest evidence yet that real exchange rates were mean reverting over the 1973 93 period we also investigate shifts in long run real exchange rates which may be important for the purpose of forecasting out of sample forecasting shows that the random walk model is outperformed by a mean stationary model especially at long horizons in addition there are substantial forecasting benefits from using a multivariate approach

does corporate governance enhance common interests of shareholders and primary stakeholders employing a unique dataset of chinese non listed firms this paper investigates the effects of the presence of 19 governance structures on 20 employees interest indicators in general we find that firms with the governance structures pay workers higher hourly wages require less monthly working hours and have a smaller chance of wage arrears meanwhile the shares of total wage and welfare expenditures in total sales revenue are lower in these firms which results in higher profitability moreover firms with the governance structures invest significantly more into training and provide employees with better fringe benefits considering the low labor pro tection standard and the weak external regulations of china s labor market we explain the positive findings thusly corporate governance structures induce managers to adjust wage payments to the efficiency wage level which is the best balance point for the interests of both shareholders and employees and therefore for maintaining the stakeholder relationships we also find the governance structures that give blockholders superpower are negatively associated with employees interests these results highlight the importance of giving enough discretion to managers in order to successfully find the common ground for creating mutual values for shareholders and employees

purchasing power parity modeling and testing mean reversion abstract a model of mean reversion of exchange rates to purchasing power parity is developed and tested where exchange rates are assumed to follow a mean reverting elastic random walk toward a stochastic ppp rate the model recognizes the possibility that mean reversion towards ppp may be nonlinear which allows greater flexibility in the adjustment process regression equations consistent with the theoretical model are derived the model is tested using long and short term data for six countries while the results are generally consistent with the findings of previous studies evidence is presented which demonstrates that the mean reversion process is not linear for some countries

real exchange rates between the wars abstract bilateral real exchange rates are analyzed for fifteen countries over the period 1925 1937 using a benchmark invariant principal components technique for the period 1925 1931 half of real exchange rate variation originates from countries on floating exchange rates and half from price level differences between countries on the gold standard for the period 1931 1937 real exchange rate movements between the sterling bloc the european gold bloc and the us and canada appear dominant within bloc variation is secondary and mostly due to competitive devaluations our results support earlier evidence that the nominal exchange rate regime to a large extent determines real exchange rate variation

nonlinear purchasing power parity under the gold standard 1 introductionrecent theoretical analysis of purchasing power deviations see e g dumas 1992 sercu uppal and van hull 1995 and o connell and wei 1997 demonstrates how transactions costs or the sunk costs of international arbitrage induce nonlinear adjustment of the real exchange rate to purchasing power parity ppp globally mean reverting this nonlinear process has the important property of exhibiting near unit root behavior for small deviations from ppp since small deviations from ppp are left uncorrected if they are not large enough to cover the transactions costs or the sunk costs of international arbitrage a parametric nonlinear model suggested by the theoretical literature that captures the nonlinear adjustment process in aggregate data is the exponential smooth transition autoregression model estar of ozaki 1985 a smooth rather than discrete adjustment mechanism is motivated by the theoretical analysis of dumas 1992 also as postulated by terasvirta 1994 and demonstrated theoretically by berka 2002 in aggregate data regime changes may be smooth rather than discrete given that heterogeneous agents do not act simultaneously even if they make dichotomous decisions 1 recent empirical work e g michael nobay and peel 1997 taylor peel and sarno 2001 peel and venetis 2002 has reported empirical results that suggest that the estar model provides a parsimonious fit into a variety of data sets particular for monthly data for the interwar and postwar floating period as well as for annual data spanning 200 years as reported in lothian and taylor 1996 in addition nonlinear impulse response functions derived from the estar models show that although the speed of adjustment for small shocks around equilibrium will be highly persistent larger shocks mean revert much faster than the glacial rates previously reported for linear models rogoff 1996 in this respect the estar models provide some solution to the ppp puzzle outlined in rogoff 1996 2the estar model can also provide an explanation of why ppp deviations analyzed from a linear perspective appear to be described by either a nonstationary integrated i 1 process or alternatively described by fractional processes see e g diebold husted and rush 1991 taylor peel and sarno 2001 and pippenger and goering 1993 show that the dickey fuller tests have low power against data simulated from an estar model michael nobay and peel 1997 and byers and peel 2003 show that data that is generated from an estar process can appear to exhibit the fractional property that this would be the case was an early conjecture by acosta and granger 1995 given that the estar model has a theoretical rationale whereas the fractional process is a relatively nonintuitive one the fractional property might reasonably be interpreted as a misleading linear property of ppp deviations granger and terasvirta 1999 whereas the empirical work employing estar models provides some explanation of the glacially slow adjustment speeds obtained in linear models there is one aspect of the empirical work that is worthy of further attention a second way of explaining the rogoff puzzle raised by rogoff himself 3 is to relax the assumption that the equilibrium real exchange rate is a constant see e g canzoneri cumby and diba 1996 and chinn and johnston 1996 theoretical models such as that of balassa 1964 and samuelson 1964 imply a nonconstant equilibrium in the real exchange rate if real productivity growth rates differ between countries 4 nonlinear models that incorporate proxies for these effects are found to parsimoniously fit post bretton woods data for the main real exchange rates see venetis paya and peel 2002 and paya venetis and peel 2003 naturally models that ignore this effect may generate misleading speeds of ppp adjustment to shocks in this regard the empirical results of hegwood and papell 2002 for the gold standard period are particularly interesting

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 process followed by ppp data on the properties of linearity tests recent research has reported the lack of correct size in stationarity test for ppp deviations within a linear framework however theoretically well motivated nonlinear models such as the estar appear to parsimoniously fit the ppp data and provide an explanation for the ppp puzzle employing monte carlo experiments we analyze the size and power of the nonlinear tests against a variety of nonstationary hypotheses we also fit the estar model to data from high inflation economies our results provide further support for estar specification

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

long memory in foreign exchange rates using the geweke porter hudak test we find evidence of long memory in exchange rate data this implies that the empirical evidence of unit roots in exchange rates may not be robust to long memory alternatives fractionally integrated autoregressive moving average arfima models are estimated by both the time domain exact maximum likelihood ml method and the frequency domain approximate ml method impulse response functions and forecasts based on these estimated arfima models are evaluated to gain insight into the long memory characteristics of exchange rates some tentative explanations of the long memory found in the exchange rates are discussed

purchasing power parity over two centuries trends and nonlinearity in two recent contributions lothian and taylor and cuddington and liang produced empirical evidence that annual data for the dollar sterling real exchange rate spanning two centuries exhibited a non linear deterministic trend this trend could be proxying harrod balassa samuelson effects lothian and taylor showed that a linear stationary autoregressive mode which embodied a cubic trend implied much faster mean reversion of the real exchange rate to shocks than a model that excluded the trend this article shows that both non linearity and a deterministic trend can be allowed for in a theoretically appealing manner and that the fitted models provide a parsimonious explanation of both the dollar sterling and franc sterling real exchange rates over the two centuries of data generalized impulse response function analysis of the models demonstrates that the speed of adjustment to shocks can be even faster when trends are considered

mitigating financial fragility with continuous workout mortgages abstract this paper models continuous workout mortgages cwms in an economic environment with refinancings and prepayments cwms are home loans whose balance and payments are indexed using a market observable house price index of the pertaining locality our main results include a explicit modelling of repayment and interest only cwms b closed form formula for mortgage payment and mortgage balance of a repayment cwm c a closed form formula for the actuarially fair mortgage rate of an interest only cwm for repayment cwms we extend our analysis to include two negotiable parameters adjustable workout proportion and adjustable workout threshold these results are of importance as they not only help in the understanding of the mechanics of cwms and estimating key contract parameters but they also provide insight on how to enhance the resilience of the financial architecture and mitigate systemic risk

the purchasing power parity persistence paradigm abstract rogoff journal of economic literature 1996 34 647 668 describes the remarkable consensus of 3 5 year half lives of purchasing power parity deviations among studies using long horizon data these studies however focus on rejections of unit roots in real exchange rates and do not use appropriate techniques to measure persistence our half life estimates explicitly account for serial correlation sampling uncertainty and most importantly small sample bias calculating confidence intervals as well as point estimates for long horizon and post 1973 data we find that even though most of the point estimates lie within the 3 5 year range univariate methods provide virtually no information regarding the size of the half lives

median unbiased estimation in df gls regressions and the ppp puzzle using median unbiased estimation recent research has questioned the validity of rogoff s remarkable consensus of 3 5 year half lives of deviations from ppp these half life estimates however are based on estimates from regressions where the resulting unit root test has low power we extend median unbiased estimation to the df gls regression of elliott rothenberg and stock 1996 we find that median unbiased estimation based on this regression has the potential to tighten confidence intervals for half lives using long horizon real exchange rate data we find that the typical lower bound of the confidence intervals for median unbiased half lives is just under 3 years thus while previous confidence intervals for half lives are consistent with virtually anything our tighter confidence intervals now rule out economic models with nominal rigidities as candidates for explaining the observed behavior of real exchange rates therefore while we obtain more information using efficient unit root tests on longer term data this information moves us away from solving the ppp puzzle

unions and workers welfare in chinese firms based on a survey of 1 268 firms in 12 cities this article empirically studies unions effects on worker welfare in china regressions carried out on a rich set of specifications show that unionization is significantly associated with higher hourly wages and larger pension coverage and weakly associated with lower monthly working hours further econometric analysis finds that unions promote individual and collective contracts the effect of collective contracts vanishes when unions are present whereas individual contracts have independent and positive effects in addition unions have effects on workers welfare independent of collective and individual contracts

was it real the exchange rate interest differential relation over the modern floating rate period in this paper we explore the relationship between real exchange rates and real interest rate differentials in the united states germany japan and the united kingdom contrary to theories based on the joint hypothesis that domestic prices are sticky and monetary disturbances are predominant we find little evidence of a stable relationship between real interest rates and real exchange rates we consider both in sample and out of sample tests one hypothesis that is consistent with our findings is that real disturbances such as productivity shocks may be a major source of exchange rate volatility this paper investigates the empirical relationship between major currency real exchange rates and real interest rates over the modern post march 1973 flexible rate experience the exchange rates examined here include the dollar mark dollar yen and dollar pound rates our two major findings are as follows first the data do not indicate a strong correspondence between real interest rate differentials short term or long term and real exchange rates this finding appears to conflict with the predictions of most monetary and portfolio balance models of exchange rate determination though the conflict can be substantially reconciled if aggregate disturbances are primarily real in nature i e changes in productivity tastes etc it is true that in many cases the sign of the estimated exchange rate interest rate differential relationship is consistent with the possible predominance of financial market disturbances but the relationship is not stable enough to be statistically significant second although one does find some evidence of a unit root in both real exchange rates and long term but not shortterm real interest differentials these two series do not appear to be linearly cointegrated hence the nonstationarity or near nonstationarity in the two series cannot be attributed to the same factor in section i we briefly describe a class of small scale monetary models of exchange rate determination the importance of this class of models for empirical work derives from its strong predictions about how the exchange rate will move

real exchange rate behavior the recent float from the perspective of the past two centuries using annual data spanning two centuries for dollar sterling and franc sterling real exchange rates we find strong evidence of mean reverting real exchange rate behavior using simple stationary autoregressive models estimated on prefloat data we easily outperform nonstationary real exchange rate models in dynamic forecasting exercises over the recent float such stationary univariate equations explain 60 80 percent of the in sample variation in real exchange rates although the degree of short run persistence may be high the econometric estimates imply a half life of shocks to the real exchange rate of about 6 years for dollar sterling and a little under 3 years for franc sterling

the long run volatility puzzle of the real exchange rate abstract this paper documents large cross country differences in the long run volatility of the real exchange rate it shows that the real exchange rate of developing countries is approximately three times more volatile than the real exchange rate in industrial countries the paper shows that this difference in volatility cannot be explained by the fact that developing countries face larger shocks both real and nominal recurrent currency crises or by different elasticities to these shocks arch estimations find a much higher persistence of deviations of the variance of the rer from its long run value when the economy suffers shocks of various kinds

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

on exchange rates nominal and real abstract the paper first develops an australian commodity currency exchange rate model which is extended to deal with real exchange rates as well the nominal and real exchange rate versions are then tested on swiss data for the post bretton woods period while the model tracks the swiss franc nominal exchange rate vis a vis the dollar and the major european currencies very well swiss ppp real exchange rates are found to be heavily contaminated with measurement error as that error explains the large co movements in nominal and ppp real exchange rates those co movements are largely irrelevant to the ppp debate

can exchange rate variations or trade policy alter the equilibrium current account abstract paul krugman has pointed out that much work needs to be done before the intertemporal open economy model can replace the open economy is lm model as a guide to policy making the objective here is to take a step in this direction by examining if an exogenous increase in world demand for home goods as via trade policy can improve the equilibrium current account within an open economy intertemporal model in the process the paper explores the theoretical issue as to whether a variation in the real exchange rate can alter the difference between saving and investment the key idea is that uncovered interest parity plus some degree of mean reversion in the real exchange rate imply that a modern version of the laursen metzler harberger effect is operative the result is that a policy induced increase in the trade balance will alter the real exchange rate which in turn increases the difference between home saving and investment and thereby improves the equilibrium current account

exchange rate mean reversion from real shocks within an intertemporal equilibrium model abstract the post bretton woods era has been characterized by real exchange rates that exhibit mean reversion with mixed evidence as to whether this reversion is partial ppp never holds or essentially complete this paper generates these stylized facts theoretically by synthesizing a simple intertemporal open economy model with the elasticities approach to the current account a central feature of the model is the existence of non traded goods the model can generate partial or approximately complete mean reversion for the real exchange rate depending on parameter values if innovations in output are made up of permanent and temporary components in addition temporary output shocks generate a type of hysteresis wherein the short run path for the exchange rate permanently alters its long run equilibrium value

labor union objectives and collective bargaining we consider a model oflabor union behavior in which workers make decisions about wages and employment by simple majority rule we show that under general conditions such a union has a well behaved objective function different from those previously postulated in the literature we then show that the union s majority preferences generally lack a von neumann morgenstern utility representation and thus cannot be inserted into traditional bargaining models we then develop and characterize the solutions to a new bargaining model that is consistent with the structure of union preferences several comparative statics results are presented

cointegration how short is the long run abstract when testing for cointegration and faced with short sample periods it is common for researchers to turn to more frequently sampled observations that is to move from annual to quarterly or monthly data in order to increase the number of observations we argue that such a gain in the degrees of freedom is more apparent than real essentially cointegration is a long run concept and hence requires long spans of data to give tests for cointegration much power rather than merely large numbers of observations using monte carlo simulations we demonstrate this for four popular tests for cointegration

the search for equilibrium relationships in international finance the case of the monetary model abstract this paper considers some of the main long run equilibrium relationships in international finance we supplement the phillips perron test which has a unit root under the null with the new kps test statistic which is based on a stationary null and apply them to the various exchange rate fundamentals the application of the johansen test for multiple cointegrating factors finds evidence of the existence of stable money demand functions in both the usa and uk with relatively short lived perturbations however there appears to be insufficient information in the data to distinguish whether the real exchange rate has a unit root or is persistent and mean reverting the consequent persistent deviations from purchasing power parity appears the only source of rejection of the equilibrium monetary model

long memory in us disaggregated petroleum consumption evidence from univariate and multivariate lm tests for fractional integration previous studies that have tested for a unit root in aggregate energy consumption have potentially reached misleading conclusions because they fail to allow for the possibility that energy consumption might be fractionally integrated and do not distinguish between different types of energy consumption this study tests for long memory in disaggregated petroleum consumption in the united states using univariate and multivariate lagrange multiplier lm tests for fractional integration the results point strongly to the need to distinguish between different forms of energy consumption and allow for a generalization of the i 0 i 1 dichotomy when considering the order of integration of energy consumption allowing for short run dynamics the univariate test suggests that less than 50 of the series are fractionally integrated consistent with expectations the non stationary series are found to have the highest mean and standard deviation the multivariate test suggests that petroleum consumption in the commercial and industrial sectors is clearly fractionally integrated when allowing for short run dynamics and as such exhibits persistent effects while petroleum consumption in the residential sector is a stationary process

real exchange rates under the gold standard purchasing power parity is one of the most important equilibrium conditions in international macroeconomics empirically it is also one of the most hotly contested numerous recent studies for example have sought to determine the validity of purchasing power parity using data from the post bretton woods float and have reached different conclusions we assert that most such studies are flawed for two reasons first the post 1973 data contain by definition only a very limited amount of the low frequency information relevant for examination of long run parity second the dynamic econometric techniques used to model deviations from parity are typically quite crude with respect to admissible low frequency dynamics both deficiencies are rectified in the present paper with dramatic results we construct a new data set of 16 real exchange rates covering more than a century of the classic gold standard period and we study deviations from parity using long memory models that allow for subtle forms of mean

haircuts or hysteresis sources of movements in real exchange rates abstract we empirically assess the importance of two sources of real exchange rate movements in models where ppp holds only among traded goods real exchange rate variation results from relative price movements within countries an alternative explanation relies on hysteretic price setting and nominal exchange rate changes using disaggregated price data from 11 oecd nations we find some support for the non traded goods models for example prices of haircuts in canada and the united states are unrelated in the long run we find stronger evidence to support models that emphasize sticky prices transportation costs or other impediments to frictionless trade

multi country evidence on the behavior of purchasing power parity under the current float abstract using panel data for the united states and 22 other oecd countries for the current float this paper presents evidence that despite substantial short term perturbations purchasing power parity actually performed much better than commonly believed average rates of growth of real exchange rates over long horizons bear little relationship either to average rates of growth of nominal exchange rates or to average inflation differentials thus implying a close to one to one relation between average rates of growth of nominal exchange rates and average inflation differentials panel data variants of standard unit root tests suggest that the real exchange rates of these countries can be characterized as mean reverting

restaurant prices and the mexican peso 1 introduction balance of payment concerns facing latin american economies have caused international currency valuations to receive ongoing scrutiny throughout the past decade and a half given its importance to regional economic performance border areas between countries such as the united states and mexico canada and the united states colombia and venezuela and ecuador and colombia also monitor exchange rate developments very closely typically one of two types of monitoring tools have been utilized for formal econometric work in this branch of international economics nominal purchasing power parity ppp indices and trade weighted real exchange rates both of the latter rely on easily obtained macroeconomic data a widely cited exception to those macroeconomic data approaches is published quarterly by the economist magazine utilizing hamburger prices from a well known restaurant corporation with worldwide franchises the research at hand develops a similar tool utilizing a variety of international restaurant franchises with operations in el paso texas and ciudad juarez chihuahua on the border between the united states and mexico more than 70 signature menu item prices are sampled every month in order to develop an exchange rate measure based on the so called law of one price hypothesis parametric and nonparametric statistical testing is then conducted to examine whether the border restaurant price ratio bears any relationship to the exchange rate value of the peso over the 36 month sample period for which data are available july 1997 june 2000 section 2 of the paper includes a literature review data and methodology are described in section 3 section 4 provides an empirical analysis of the results concluding remarks and suggestions for future research are included in section 5 2 literature review exchange rate monitoring has become a staple of international corporate and public policy analysis in the two plus decade period subsequent to the demise of the bretton woods fixed exchange rate system a common approach is the measurement of trade weighted real exchange rates designed for country risk analysis and balance of payments pressure gauging such indexes will generally indicate overvaluation with respect to a preselected base with values in excess of 100 and undervaluation with values below 100 batten and belongia 1986 fullerton 1989 another practice is the calculation of theoretical nominal exchange rates under a ppp approach beltran del rfo 1999 the latter are often popular among financial market analysts because they are defined in the actual units in which trades are conducted international restaurant franchise menu pricing has given rise to a new empirical variant on the law of one price in recent years the economist magazine runs a periodic comparison of hamburger prices to nominal exchange rates for a group of 20 plus countries the economist 1998 hamburger prices in local currency units are divided by a corresponding dollar price whenever the resulting price ratio is higher than the exchange rate it implies that the local currency is overvalued when the ratio is below the prevailing exchange rate it implies the opposite the popularity of this readily identifiable index has spawned several subsequent studies that study both geographic and time series characteristics and implications of the approach while cumby 1996 and ong 1997 find fairly good evidence in favor of the hamburger index pakko and pollard 1996 conclude that nontradability and institutional factors cause it to perform unreliably a growing number of studies examine the ppp principle using data that involve more than one product and take into account geographic factors such as distance engel and rogers 1996 parsley and wei 2000 in one such effort james gerber sampled individual menu items from seven restaurants in san diego and tijuana regents of the university of california 1997

measuring the persistence of deviations from purchasing power parity with a fractionally integrated star model abstract empirically elements of both fractional long memory and threshold non linearity are present in the real exchange rates of the g 7 countries against the us notably in the eu countries estimated half lives of deviations from ppp using median unbiased corrections to conventional linear autoregressive models corroborate existing evidence related to the ppp paradox as half lives range from at least four years to an infinite number of years in contrast for each eu country accounting for threshold non linearity results in estimated half lives that can be less than three years even with the allowance for fractional long memory

long run purchasing power parity during the recent float abstract this paper examines the relevance of long run purchasing power parity ppp which allows for measurement errors during the recent floating exchange rate period previous empirical studies generally fail to find support for long run ppp over this period in this paper in this paper the cointegration property of exchange rates and prices is examined using maximum likelihood procedure and we find significant evidence favorable to long run ppp further tests for symmetry and proportionality indicate that these two conditions are not generally with the data the results support the hypothesis of long run ppp with measurement errors in prices

real exchange rates under the gold standard can they be explained by the trend break model abstract we investigate whether real exchange rates under the gold standard can be modeled as stationary around a broken trend using both conventional unit root and sequential trend break tests we clearly reject the unit root null for 14 of the 16 exchange rates studied by diebold husted and rush journal of political economy 1991 99 and provide some evidence against a unit root for another we interpret our results as being complementary to the evidence for fractional integration found by diebold husted and rush in both cases the unit root null can be decisively rejected if the alternative is more flexible than a deterministic trend without breaks

cointegration fractional cointegration and exchange rate dynamics multivariate tests due to johansen 1988 1991 as implemented by baillie and bollerslev 1989a and diebold gardeazabal and yilmaz 1994 reveal mixed evidence on whether a group of exchange rates are cointegrated further analysis of the deviations from the cointegrating relationship suggests that it possesses long memory and may possibly be well described as a fractionally integrated process hence the influence of shocks to the equilibrium exchange rates may only vanish at very long horizons in the article by baillie and bollerslev 1989a it is argued that seven different nominal spot and forward exchange rates all contain unit roots in their univariate time series representations at the same time however the spot exchange rates appear to be tied together in the long run through a cointegration type relationship the latter finding of baillie and bollerslev has attracted particular interest and several studies such as those by hakkio and rush 1991 and sephton and larsen 1991 have already addressed this issue using the same data as the baillie and bollerslev article sephton and larsen 1991 describe the evidence for the presence of cointegration as being fragile and note that mixed conclusions are reached by truncating the baillie and bollerslev sample at different points in time diebold gardeazabal and yilmaz 1994 henceforth diebold et al provide interesting evidence that application of the johansen 1988 1991 tests with and without an intercept will result in different inferences on the baillie and bollerslev data set furthermore diebold et al carry out an ex ante forecasting experiment and find that the addition of an error correction term to the martingale model as implied by the standard cointegration paradigm fails to reduce the prediction mean square error when compared to a simple martingale model this therefore leads diebold et al to conclude that there exists substantial uncertainty regarding the existence of cointegration relationships among nominal dollar exchange rates this article provides some additional evidence on the existence of such a long run relationship among the same seven nominal spot exchange rates after further analysis it appears that a form of cointegration does exist between the exchange rates so that they do not drift apart in the long run we argue that this form of cointegration is

mean reversion in real exchange rates a modified dickey fuller test which is approximately uniformly most power invariant is employed to examine mean reversion in real exchange rates results from this test provide a wider and more significant support for mean reversion than the standard dickey fuller test

asian pacific real exchange rates real exchange rate behaviour is investigated for 11 asian pacific countries between 1976 and 1990 using a modified version of principal components analysis the standard principal component analysis is changed such that the results are independent of the numeraire currency for the full sample period the dominant asian exchange rate movements are relative to indonesia japan and the united states significant changes in the convariance structure have taken place since 1986 it appears that asian pacific real exchange rate movements since september 1986 are dominated by australia korea new zealand and japan this contradicts the popular notion of an emerging yen block in the asian pacific region

understanding the empirical literature on purchasing power parity the post bretton woods era abstract this paper argues that the empirical failure of statistical tests of ppp in post bretton woods data is largely due to the low power of the tests employed this result is demonstrated using monte carlo experiments on the size and power of different testing procedures a new procedure based on horvath and watson econometric theory 11 pp 984 1014 1995 has greater power than previous approaches using the horvath watson procedure we find moderate evidence in favor of ppp in the post bretton woods era

purchasing power parity an analysis based on the evolutionary spectrum the bulk of the literature on the empirical validation of the purchasing power parity ppp has been based on cointegration although on rare occasions band spectrum analysis has also been used the former is tied down to the use of notional time in the analysis of systems away from equilibrium and the latter is circumscribed by the slutzky yule effect both these drawbacks are sought to be remedied in the present paper which seeks to bring to bear upon the ppp a new approach derived from the concept of a time varying spectrum both absolute and relative versions of the doctrine are tested for ten advanced economies over the post 1973 period uniform rejection of the ppp occurs with the us as base but with centring on the dm the evidence seems to be supportive of the ppp in its relative version for three european countries