does exchange rate variability depress trade flows evidence from error correction models this paper examines the impact of exchange rate volatility on the trade flows of the g 7 countries in the context of a multivariate error correction model the error correction models do not show any sign of parameter instability the results indicate that the exchange rate volatility has a significant negative impact on the volume of exports in each of the g 7 countries assuming market participants are risk averse these results imply that exchange rate uncertainty causes them to reduce their activities change prices or shift sources of demand and supply in order to minimize their exposure to the effects of exchange rate volatility this in turn can change the distribution of output across many sectors in these countries it is quite possible that the surprisingly weak relationship between trade flows and exchange rate volatility reported in several previous studies are due to insufficient attention to the stochastic properties of the relevant time series copyright 1993 by mit press

u s bilateral trade flows and exchange risk during the floating period abstract this paper tests for real exchange rate risk effects on u s bilateral trade flows during the floating period using several new as well as previously used risk measures significant negative effects occur in five of six u s import flows and in two of six u s export flows with one export flow showing a significant positive effect these results are consistent with several previous findings for aggregate u s trade two risk measures using the forward exchange rate and assuming a time varying risk premium provide marginally more significant results than the others

are preferential trading arrangements trade liberalizing or protectionist preferential trade arrangements and especially free trade agreements have mushroomed in importance in the 1990s this has revived research on the effects of these arrangements both on the welfare of the member countries and those excluded and on the momentum for further liberalization of the open multilateral trading system this paper reviews the analyses and evidence to date as to these effects showing that analytically anything can happen and that to date there has been insufficient experience to draw conclusions from empirical evidence

liquidity constraint uncertainty and household consumption in china this paper investigates the changing roles played by liquidity constraint and uncertainty in accounting for the dynamism of chinese household consumption behaviour starting from the euler equation based model of robert hall a framework encompassing an array of consumption models is developed and applied to chinese data over the period 1961 1998 empirical results reveal a regime shift in the early 1980s and imply that increases in the proportion of liquidity constrained consumers and increased uncertainty in the post reform period are responsible for the extremely low consumption or high savings in china moreover it is found that interactions between liquidity constraint and uncertainty reinforce each other s effects and lead to declines in both the level and growth of consumption

a gravity model analysis of meat trade policies abstract the conventional gravity model is revised for a single commodity and applied to meat markets to determine factors affecting trade flows of meat this study demonstrates that the gravity model for a single agricultural commodity can be parameterized more effectively by using time series and cross section data rather than cross section data alone this study reveals that trade policies and subsidies used by exporting and importing countries livestock production capacity in countries and distances play an important role in determining trade flows of meat long term agreements achieve the highest performance toward enhancing international meat trade import quotas and the hoof and mouth disease on beef greatly impair meat trade

international financial volatility and agricultural commodity trade a primer recent international financial crises east asia in 1997 russia in 1998 brazil in 1999 and the speed with which they have spread across countries and regions have called into question the very desirability of financial globalization that is the opening of balance of payments capital accounts in both developed and emerging economies since the mid 1980s 1 calls for a new global financial architecture have multiplied and new and old theoretical arguments for and against controlling capital flows as well as domestic financial markets especially banks have been put forward imf rodrik stiglitz there is little empirical evidence to support the debate over the potential effects of enhanced financial volatility at the sectoral level and especially on the agricultural economy has international financial volatility actually affected real sectoral performance and if so how after briefly reviewing literature in this area this paper introduces the methodology and preliminary results of an on going research project that addresses that question with reference to agricultural commodity trade the purpose of the paper is both to generate productive discussion and to motivate similar research in this

exchange rate uncertainty and agricultural trade using a sample of bilateral trade flows across ten developed countries between 1974 and 1995 this article explores the effect of exchange rate uncertainty on the growth of agricultural trade as compared to other sectors based on a gravity model that controls for other factors likely to determine bilateral trade the results show that real exchange rate uncertainty has had a significant negative effect on agricultural trade over this period moreover the negative impact of uncertainty on agricultural trade has been more significant compared to other sectors

the impacts of exchange rate volatility on vegetable trade flows trade flows of commodities are generally affected by the principles of comparative advantage in a free trade however trade flows might be enhanced or distorted not only by various government interventions but also by exchange rate fluctuations among others this study applies a commodity specific gravity model to selected vegetable trade flows among organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries to determine the effects of exchange rate uncertainty on the trade flows using the data from 1996 to 2002 the results show that while the exchange rate uncertainty significantly reduces trade in the majority of commodity flows there is evidence that both short and long term volatility have positive effect on trade flows of specific commodities this study also tests the regional preferential trade agreements such as the north american free trade agreement nafta the asia pacific economic cooperation apec and the eu and their different effects on commodities

exchange rate risk and u s agricultural trade flows this paper analyzes the effect of exchange rate risk on u s agricultural trade flows a model which incorporates exchange rate risk is applied to ten countries while exchange rate risk was not significant in the seven developed markets results indicate that the exchange rate variable adversely affected u s agricultural exports to the three developing countries used in the analysis these findings underscore the importance of exchange rate risk in developing countries trading behavior issues such as establishment of well developed financial and commodity markets in developing countries must be addressed in future research

fiscal policy monetary targets and the price level in a centrally planned economy an application to the case of china this paper presents a planned economy monetary model of china a money supply equation links changes in broad money to government transactions evaluated at official prices the demand for real money balances by consumers equals the nominal demand for money deflated by an unobserved true price index the model explains money demand as the divergence between the then official and true price indices changes in the money supply are explained by government transactions while money demand is explained by real income and the anticipated true rate of inflation the true rate of inflation is 2 5 times the official rate copyright 1987 by ohio state university press

capital budgeting for interrelated projects a real options approach this paper explores the effect of project interrelationships on investment decisions and project values in a real options framework we examine in detail the mutually exclusive case where a firm may invest in the development stage of two projects and then may select only a single project to implement the firm can develop the projects in parallel or in sequence the choice of development policy depends on the relative values of the embedded options for each strategy sequential development is shown to be superior to parallel development when projects have highly correlated values and when they require a large commitment of capital for development are short term in nature and have relatively low volatility we also show that the optimal ordering of sequential projects does not always begin with the most profitable project

one money one market the effect of common currencies on trade currency unions their dramatic effect on international trade a gravity model is used to assess the separate effects of exchange rate volatility and currency unions on international trade the panel data bilateral observations for five years during 1970 90 covering 186 countries includes 300 observations in which both countries use the same currency i find a large positive effect of a currency union on international trade and a small negative effect of exchange rate volatility even after controlling for a host of features including the endogenous nature of the exchange rate regime these effects statistically significant imply that two countries sharing the same currency trade three times as much as they would with different currencies currency unions like the european emu may thus lead to a large increase in international trade with all that that entails andrew rose

economic policy uncertainty and dollar pound exchange rate return volatility abstract the extent to which economic policy uncertainty epu amplifies exchange rate volatility has been an important research question for at least a decade previous research has investigated this relationship using monthly data concluding that epu imparts an effect on exchange rate volatility either contemporaneously or with a one month lag the use of monthly frequency however may not provide an accurate causal interpretation and may even compromise the accuracy of the estimates if the natural cycles of epu are shorter than a month to address this econometric concern i construct uncertainty measures at a daily frequency and estimate a garch model using daily usd british pound returns the evidence indicates that epu contributes to exchange rate volatility much more quickly than monthly data can detect using a regression technique for separating epu from non policy economic uncertainty i find that non policy market uncertainty increases volatility more than epu does

does environmental dumping lead to delocation environmental dumping is often viewed as an instrument used by some countries in the attempt to attract foreign investments stated otherwise the delocation of firms would be a major outcome of a stiff environmental policy in this paper we study the impact of a strict anti pollution policy pursued by a government on domestic firms locational decisions and determine the main variables that interact with such a policy some preliminary welfare implications are also provided

exchange rate uncertainty and foreign trade abstract this paper starts with reviewing the existing literature on exchange rate uncertainty and trade flows it then argues that potential costs of medium term uncertainty in exchange rates and competitiveness are likely to be much larger than that of exchange risk which has been the focus of the existing literature two measures of medium term exchange rate uncertainty are constructed one is a weighted function of the magnitude of past movements in nominal exchange rates and the current deviation of the exchange rate from equilibrium while the second depends on both the duration and the amplitude of misalignment from equilibrium exchange rates the empirical evidence reported in the paper suggests that when exchange rate uncertainty is defined over a medium term period it does affect adversely trade flows of the industrial countries under review with the notable exception of the united states

sectoral effects of exchange rate volatility on united states exports abstract we analyze the effects of real exchange rate volatility on the proportions of bilateral exports of nine categories of goods from the united states to seven major industrial countries using a fixed effect framework in six of the nine categories the volatility of the real exchange rate significantly affects the value of exports and in five of these categories the effect is positive these results are consistent with a model in which risk neutral firms increase supply of elastically demanded exports in response to an increase in the volatility of the real exchange rate

the impact of nafta on the united states we describe the main economic arguments posed for and against the north american free trade agreement nafta during the u s policy debate to evaluate these arguments we analyze recent trade data and survey post nafta studies we find that both the u s and mexico benefit from nafta with much larger relative benefits for mexico nafta also has had little effect on the u s labor market these results confirm the consensus opinion of economists at the time of the debate finally studies find that trade creation greatly exceeds trade diversion in the region under nafta especially in intermediate goods

macroeconomic disequilibrium structural changes and the household savings and money demand in china abstract this paper presents an empirical study of the chinese personal money demand and savings in an economy of disequilibrium and structural changes we propose specifications capable of encompassing and testing the two competing hypotheses which have been advanced to explain the case of the chinese household money demand and savings based on the national and provincial data we find that both repressed inflation and structural changes are significant suggesting the need to capture both the possible disequilibrium and structural shifts further statistical evidence shows that there might have been multiple regime shifts during the post 1949 period which is at variance with the conventional approach of exclusive focus of the effects of the recent reforms nesting the competing hypotheses appears to be the key in providing an adequate account of the savings and money demand of the chinese household sector the evidence seems to favor the repressed inflation hypothesis

measurement of repressed inflation in china abstract we estimate a measure of the repression of the chinese price level by developing a simple analytical model which derives a true rate of inflation on the basis of the different rates of change of the stock of money in circulation and the nominal value of retail sales this true rate of inflation is then used to explain changes in quasi money balances we estimate this model for the period 1979 1988 using quarterly data the results strongly support the hypothesis of repressed inflation the annual rate of inflation of the true price index is approximately 12 4 percent higher than that of the official price index over the 10 year period

monopolistic competition and international trade reconsidering the evidence we test some propositions about international trade flows that are derived from models of monopolistic competition developed by elhanan helpman and paul krugman we investigate whether the volume of trade between oecd countries is consistent with the predictions of a model in which all trade is intraindustry trade in differentiated products we then repeat the test with non oecd countries we also investigate whether the share of intraindustry trade is consistent with a more general theoretical model in which some but not all trade is intraindustry trade our results lead us to question the apparent empirical success of these models

real exchange rate volatility and the us bilateral trade a var approach this paper uses var models to investigate the impact of real exchange rate volatility on u s bilateral imports from the united kingdom france germany japan and canada the var systems include u s and foreign macro variables and are estimated separately for each country the major results suggest that the effect of volatility on imports is weak although permanent shocks to volatility do have a negative impact on this measure of trade and those effects are relatively more important over the flexible rate period copyright 1989 by mit press

exchange rate uncertainty and us bilateral fresh fruit and fresh vegetable trade an application of the gravity model in order to analyse the effect of exchange rate uncertainty we apply an empirical gravity equation to two sets of us bilateral trade data fresh fruit over the period 1976 1999 for a panel of 26 countries and fresh vegetables over the period 1976 2006 for a panel of nine countries based on panel estimation methods and using both a moving sd measure and the peree and steinherr 1989 measure of exchange rate uncertainty the results show that us bilateral fresh fruit trade has been negatively affected by exchange rate uncertainty we also find some evidence that the exchange rate between the us dollar and the currencies of latin american trading partners accounts for most of the negative impact of exchange rate uncertainty on bilateral trade flows in fresh fruit in contrast when using panel estimation methods and both measures of exchange rate uncertainty we find no statistically significant evidence for any negative effect of exchange rate uncertainty on us bilateral fresh vegetable trade however

value versus growth stocks book to market growth and beta 1994 value versus growth stocks book to market growth and beta financial analysts journal vol 50 no 5 pp 18 24

bilateral trade flows the linder hypothesis and exchange risk bilateral trade flows are used to examine the linder hypothesis and the effect of exchange rate variability in a gra vity type trade model derived from an underlying demand and supply mo del a behavioral model is used to justify examining these issues joi ntly the model performs well empirically using a sample of seventeen countries for the period 1974 82 the authors find overwhelming supp ort for the linder hypothesis and this version of the gravity model moreover they find strong support for the hypothesis that increased exchange rate variability affects bilateral trade flows copyright 1987 by mit press

international trade and environmental regulation time series evidence and cross section test this paper examines empiricallywhether more stringent domestic environmental policiesreduce the international competitiveness ofenvironmentally sensitive goods esgs our timeseries evidence indicates that there are no systematicchanges in trade patterns of esgs in the last threedecades despite the introduction of more stringentenvironmental regulations in most of the developedcountries in the 1970s and 1980s this observedphenomenon is then subjected to a multi countryeconometric test using an extended gravity equationframework the test suggests that overall morestringent environmental regulations do not reducetotal exports exports of esgs and exports ofnon resource based esgs neither was there anyevidence to support the hypothesis that new tradebarriers emerge to offset the effects of morestringent environmental regulations

changes in cash persistence and pricing implications this paper decomposes the cash component of earnings and analyzes persistence characteristics and pricing implications of various subcomponents with particular attention to changes in cash changes in underlying fundamentals might dictate changes in cash to new optimal levels alternatively suboptimal changes in cash might result from agency costs allowing managers actions to diverge from the best interests of shareholders we predict and find that both suboptimal increases and decreases in cash bode poorly for future earnings in fact we find that suboptimal increases decreases in cash have less greater persistence than any of the earnings components we study including accruals and net distributions to both shareholders and debt holders market efficiency tests indicate that the market severely punishes firms with suboptimal decreases in cash but we find no evidence to support the hubris hypothesis that the market overreacts to the earnings implications of unwarranted increases in cash

national borders and international trade evidence from the european union in this paper the impact of national borders on international trade within the european union is considered using a gravity model i find that averaged over all eu countries intranational trade is about ten times as high as international trade with an eu partner country of similar size and distance this relatively strong home bias suggests that even within the european union national borders still have a decisive impact on trade patterns jel classification f02 f14 f15 o52 ce memoire examine l impact des frontieres nationales sur le commerce international a l interieur de l union europeenne on montre que en moyenne pour tous les pays de l union europeenne le commerce intranational est a peu pres dix fois plus important que le commerce international avec un pays partenaire de l union europeenne de meme taille et a meme distance ce degre relativement important de preference nationale suggere que meme dans le cadre de l union europeenne les frontieres nationales ont encore un impact determinant sur les patterns de commerce

earnings acceleration and stock returns abstract we document that earnings acceleration defined as the quarter over quarter change in earnings growth has significant explanatory power for future excess returns these excess returns are robust to a wide range of previously documented anomalies and a battery of risk controls the future return predictability appears to be consistent with investors assuming a seasonal random walk model for quarterly earnings and missing predictable implications of earnings acceleration for future earnings growth finally the excess returns from the basic earnings acceleration strategy can be enhanced further by focusing on profit firms low earnings volatility firms and on specific patterns of earnings acceleration

slack shortage and discouraged consumers in eastern europe estimates based on smoothing by aggregation as a consequence of aggregation over markets the observed quantity may be less than the quantity demanded and less than the quantity supplied to deal with such situations a new technique is proposed for estimating demand and supply curves and the extent of shortage and slack the technique is applied to the consumption goods markets of czechoslovakia the german democratic republic hungary poland and yugoslavia it is found that shortage even corrected for a discouraged consumer effect is seldom as great as slack

does exchange rate stability increase trade and welfare we develop a simple general equilibrium framework to study the effect of the exchange rate system on trade and welfare an important feature of the model is deviations from purchasing power parity caused by rigid price setting in buyers currency we find the following first exchange rate stability is not necessarily associated with more trade in a simple benchmark model with separable preferences and only monetary shocks trade is unaffected by the exchange rate system consistent with most evidence second both trade and welfare can be higher under either exchange rate system depending on preferences and on the monetary policy rules followed under each system finally in general there is no one to one relationship between the levels of trade and welfare across exchange rate systems

consumption demand saving behaviour and rational expectations an application of disequilibrium modelling to china 1952 92 in explaining dramatic changes in chinese household savings and money demand behaviour in the reform period previous studies proposed and tested three different hypotheses however no effort has been made to distinguish quantitatively between forced and voluntary savings in terms of their quanta reasons and effects the role of rational expectations in determining household behaviour has not received proper attention and a puzzle of high domestic savings ratio accompanied by low interest rates still remains to be solved this paper adopts a disequilibrium framework capable of investigating these issues our research yields some interesting and important results its findings support the conjecture that both regime shifts and repressed inflation have contributed to the rapidly rising personal money balances during the reform period with the former being a dominant factor it is shown that household voluntary savings can be well explained by official interest rates only forced savings and instantaneou

cointegration and the long run forecast of exchange rates abstract multivariate cointegration is used to generate the long run forecast of the dollar dm exchange rate it is shown that while the random walk model outperforms the monetary structural models in the short run the latter based on the error correction model outperform the former in the long run

savings commodity market rationing and the real rate of interest in china abstract the theoretical nature of risk premiums in foreign currency futures markets is derived and studied empirically estimation problems encountered in using futures data are discussed since forward rates and futures prices have been found to be approximately equal and because risk in daily risk premiums in the futures market unbiasedness of daily futures prices as predictors of the following day s futures price is rejected for all currencies reconciliation of daily and monthyl data requires positive serial correlation in daily risk premiums

a political economic model of u s bilateral trade a bstract interrelationships between economics and politics have long been recognized by scholars in the field of international relations this paper attempts to identify and quantify the factors aflecting bilateral trade flows between the united states and other countries by developing a gravity type model the model includes economic and political variables and is tested using data for sixty six u s trading partners results indicate that pure economic variables which reflect market forces are not the only factors affecting u s bilateral trade semi cconomic and international political factors are also important