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

who withdraws housing equity and why the decision to extract home equity is examined using household level data for the uk over 1993 2003 at its peak during the period around 1 in 10 homeowners withdraw equity per year little is known about this financial decision i find that the equity withdrawal decision conforms to predictions from the standard life cycle framework and models that predict its use as a financial buffer the paper also estimates responses to the large house price appreciation and significant reductions in mortgage rates seen during the period

exchange rate volatility and export growth in nigeria this article examines the impact of exchange rate volatility on nigeria s exports to its most important trading partner the united states over the quarterly period january 1980 to april 2001 using cointegration and vector error correction vecm framework empirical tests indicate the presence of a unique cointegrating vector linking real exports real foreign income relative export prices and real exchange rate volatility in the long run furthermore the results show that increases in the volatility of the real exchange rate raise uncertainty about profits to be made which exert significant negative effects on exports both in the short and long run our results also show that improvements in the terms of trade represented by declines in the real exchange rate and real foreign income exert positive effects on export activity most importantly we found that the trade liberalization and economic reform policies implemented in the post 1986 structural adjustment period contributed to nigeria s export

comments on credit ratings and the bis capital adequacy reform agenda the new basel capital accord basel committee on banking supervision 1999 has the objective of making capital requirements appropriately sensitive to the degree of risk in bank activities this is important because the original capital accord 1998 has been widely criticized for the lack of risk sensitivity of the capital charges assessed against various types of loans many observers believe this has resulted in regulatory arbitrage on the part of banks to the detriment of the quality of the assets banks hold on their books the basel committee has proposed a standardized approach for determining risk based capital using external ratings and two other approaches based on internal models for dealing with credit risk 1 altman et al 2002 examines in detail whether the goal of appropriate risk sensitivity is met by the proposed risk weights of the standardized approach the main conclusion of the altman et al paper and the underlying issues can be seen in fig 1 which plots the proposed risk weights and the historical corporate bond losses by rating as the authors note ratings aaa through a have experienced virtually no defaults but are assigned weights of 20 aaa and aa and 50 a percent more problematic the proposed risk weights for baa and ba rated loans are both 100 even though the loss experience for ba is 10 times higher than for baa finally the b and below rated loans have risk weights only half again as large as baa rated loans while the historical loss experience has been 55 times greater thus the basel proposal fails to capture the relative risks of the various ratings altman et al journal of banking finance 26 2002 923 928

foreign exchange market reactions to sovereign credit news abstract we analyse the reaction of the foreign exchange spot market to sovereign credit signals by fitch moody s and s p during 1994 2010 we find that positive and negative credit news affects both the own country exchange rate and other countries exchange rates we provide evidence on unequal responses to the three agencies signals fitch signals induce the most timely market responses and the market also reacts strongly to s p negative outlook signals credit outlook and watch actions and multiple notch rating changes have more impact than one notch rating changes considerable differences in the market reactions to sovereign credit events are highlighted in emerging versus developed economies and in various geographical regions

has the european monetary system led to more exports evidence from four european union countries abstract we attempt to investigate whether the exchange rate mechanism erm period has coincided with an increase in intra eu exports we conclude that this has not been the case but it is likely that the elimination of nominal exchange rate variability arising from a single currency will boost intra european union trade

global imbalances and financial fragility the united states is currently engulfed in the most severe financial crisis since the great depression the crisis was triggered by the crash in the real estate bubble and amplified by the extreme concentration of risk in a highly leveraged financial sector conventional wisdom is that both the bubble and the risk concentration were the result of mistakes in regulatory policy an expansionary monetary policy during the boom period of the bubble and failure to reign in the practices of unscrupulous lenders in this paper we argue that while correct in some dimensions this story misses two key structural factors behind the securitization process that supported the real estate boom and the corresponding lever age first over the last decade the us has experienced large and sustained capital inflows from foreigners seeking us assets to store value caballero emmanuel farhi and pierre olivier gourinchas 2008 second especially after the nasdaq tech bubble and bust excess world savings have looked predominantly for safe debt investments this should not be surprising because a large amount of the capital flow into the us has been from foreign central banks and governments that are not expert investors and are merely looking for a store of value krishnamurthy and annette vissing jorgenson 2008 in this paper we develop a stylized model that captures the essence of this environment the model accounts for three facts observed during the boom and bust phases of the current crisis first during a period of good shocks which we interpret as the period up to the end

conditional exchange rate volatility and the volume of foreign trade evidence from seven industrialized countries there has long been a concern over the volatility of exchange rates and their impact on the volume of foreign trade however very little attention has been paid to the choice of an appropriate volatility variable as well as the proper specification of the trade equation the sample standard deviation of the exchange rate has been used as a proxy for exchangerate uncertainty in empirical studies that examine the effects of exchange rate uncertainty on the volume of foreign trade see for example akhtar and hilton 1 and gotur 27 these studies have provided conflicting evidence on this issue it has been argued that use of the sample standard deviation is inappropriate because the empirical distribution of exchange rates is not normal 22 10 in this regard subsequent empirical research 12 36 40 41 11 has employed a moving standard deviation of the rate of change of the exchange rate as a proxy for exchange rate uncertainty chowdhury 11 obtained a clear pattern of results that support the hypothesis that the higher volatility of exchange rates led to a reduction in international trade transactions after the breakdown of the bretton woods system in march 1973 other studies have reported ambiguous results 2 the moving standard deviation used in these studies has been criticized in the literature for a ignoring relevant information on the random process generating exchange rates 18 b underestimating the effect of volatility on decisions 52 c distorting the measurement of the volatility variable by smoothing the series 9 and d injecting an element of arbitrariness into the calculation through decisions about the order m of the moving average 43 3

exchange rate volatility and foreign trade evidence from thirteen ldc s this article investigates empirically the impact of real exchange rate volatility on the export flows of 13 less developed countries ldc s over the quarterly period 1973 1996 estimates of the cointegrating relations are obtained using johansen s multivariate procedure estimates of the short run dynamics are obtained for each country using the error correction technique the major results show that increases in the volatility of the real effective exchange rate approximating exchange rate uncertainty exert a significant negative effect on export demand in both the short run and the long run in each of the 13 ldc s these effects may result in significant reallocation of resources by market participants

the causal effect of income on health evidence from german reunification we investigate whether there was a causal effect of income changes on the health satisfaction of east and west germans in the years following reunification our data source is the german socio economic panel gsoep between 1984 and 2002 and we fit a recently proposed fixed effects ordinal estimator to our health measures and use a causal decomposition technique to account for panel attrition we find evidence of a significant positive effect of income changes on health satisfaction but the quantitative size of this effect is small this is the case with respect to current income and a measure of permanent income

a public good approach to credit ratings from concept to reality abstract from the onset of the 2008 2009 financial crisis to the subsequent european sovereign debt crisis credit rating agencies have been assigned considerable blame reforming the credit rating industry has hence become an important policy issue in addition to the regulatory efforts in the context of accepting the for profit business model of ratings there is a growing realization that credit ratings bear the characteristics of a public good financial market participants need reliable transparent and independent assessment of credit risks credit ratings are therefore better viewed as an infrastructure matter however the proposed regulations seem to have missed this point this paper introduces a new approach to credit ratings undertaken by the risk management institute at the national university of singapore that is predicated on the provision of credit ratings as a public good with a public good alternative in place the currently predominant for profit business model may be counterbalanced

exchange rate volatility and japan u s commodity trade an asymmetry analysis exchange rate volatility is said to affect trade flows in either direction when increased volatility is separated from decreased volatility asymmetric analysis reveals even more support for the fact that both increased volatility and decreased volatility affect trade flows in either direction we add to this new literature by considering 57 industries that trade between japan and the us in addition to providing evidence of asymmetric response of their trade flows to a measure of exchange rate volatility our approach identifies industries that could benefit from increased exchange rate volatility and those that could be hurt similarly we identify industries that could benefit from decreased volatility and those that could be hurt the overall conclusion is the adverse effects of dollar yen volatility on the trade between the two countries

exchange rate exchange rate volatility and foreign direct investment in the light of the importance of foreign direct investment fdi for the promotion of economic development this paper examines the impact of the changes in the real exchange rate and its volatility on fdi examining japan s fdi by industries we found that the depreciation of the currency of the host country attracted fdi while the high volatility of the exchange rate discouraged fdi our results suggest the need to avoid over valuation of the exchange rate and to maintain stable but flexible exchange rate in order to attract fdi

the choice of exchange rate regimes in developing countries a multinomial panel analysis abstract this paper analyses the choices of exchange rate regimes in developing countries since 1980 static and dynamic random effects multinomial panel models are estimated using simulation based techniques explanatory variables include oca fundamentals stabilization considerations currency crises factors and political and institutional features the results reveal strong state dependence in regime choices we also find evidence for non monotonic relationship between regime determinants and the degree of regime flexibility

new evidence on the monetary approach of exchange rate determination in mexico 1994 2007 a cointegrated svar model abstract we provide empirical evidence supporting the validity of both short and long run versions of the monetary approach of exchange rate determination for the mexican peso u s dollar exchange rate from 1994 to 2007 using a cointegrated svar model we estimate not only the long run relationship between the variables of the monetary model for the exchange rate but also the very short run effects which have been often ignored in previous empirical work we show that there are robust short and long run relationships between the mexican monetary aggregates and the exchange rate which ultimately responds to what bilson s variant of maer predicts

income related inequalities in mental health in great britain analysing the causes of health inequality over time using regression techniques this paper estimates the level of income related health inequality in gb in 1992 and 1998 inequality is decomposed to investigate which socio demographic factors are important contributors to health differences the paper includes a range of measured and subjective income variables to control for absolute income a relative deprivation measure is included to test the impact of income inequality on health inequality it is found that subjective financial status is a major determinant of ill health and makes a major contribution to income related inequalities in health relative deprivation is an important contributor for women but not for men

the impact of terms of trade and real exchange rate volatility on investment and growth in sub saharan africa abstract specialization in primary product exports reduces growth but why adverse trends in and the high variance of primary product prices are possible explanations the impact on investment and growth of the level and volatility of the terms of trade and the real effective exchange rate is estimated for a panel of 14 sub saharan african countries over 1980 1995 growth is negatively affected by terms of trade instability and investment by real exchange rate instability both growth and investment increase when the terms of trade improve and real exchange rate overvaluation is eliminated

same currency different strategies the role of the exchange rate in shaping european agri food exports abstractthis article uses a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag nadrl model introduced by shin yu and greenwood nimmo 2014 to assess the role that the exchange rate plays in shaping european agri food exports after the introduction of the euro although the 10 countries of this study share the same currency and thus a single nominal exchange rate with the us cross country discrepancies of exports reactions to exchange rate changes are evident moreover i find that exchange rate changes influence exports asymmetrically in the long run euro appreciations are harmful to a lesser extent than euro depreciations are beneficial for european agri food exports the magnitude of this effect is country specific and varies considerably between individual exporting countries exported quantities are less affected by exchange rate fluctuations than export values which is in line with local currency price stabilization strategies of the exporters this finding is interpreted as a sign of an incomplete

investments in modern production technology and the cash flow oriented epq model in this study we analyze investments in setup and production processes in the context of the traditional inventory problem the comparison of the results of a cash flow and a cost oriented model suggests the use of the net present value as a decision criterion the analysis shows that an additional investment which reduces setup cost decreases the optimal capital investment necessary to reduce production cost and vice versa an investment which increases the production rate however may increase or decrease the capital expenditure of an investment in the setup process

exchange rate volatility and exports new empirical evidence from the emerging east asian economies this paper examines the impact of bilateral real exchange rate volatility on real exports of five emerging east asian countries among themselves as well as to 13 industrialised countries we recognise the specificity of the exports between the emerging east asian and industrialised countries and employ a generalised gravity model in the empirical analysis we use a panel comprising 25 years of quarterly data and perform unit root and cointegration tests to verify the long run relationship among the variables the results provide strong evidence that exchange rate volatility has a negative impact on the exports of emerging east asian countries in addition the results suggest that the pattern of bilateral exports is influenced by third country variables an increase in the price competitiveness of other emerging east asian countries has a negative impact on a country s exports to a destination market but the magnitude of the impact is relatively small these results are robust across different estimation techniques and do not depend on the variable chosen to proxy exchange rate uncertainty the results of the gmm iv estimation also confirm the negative impact of exchange rate volatility on exports and suggest that this negative relationship is not driven by simultaneous causality bias

monetary policy in a heterogeneous monetary union the australian experience australia is a monetary union with strong regional specialization manufacturing and service industries are located in the population centres on the south eastern seaboard and mining and pastoral activities take place in the interior and north of the continent monetary policy affects the interior and north more strongly than the south eastern seaboard because australian primary goods are mostly exported and the exchange rate provides the main transmission channel for monetary policy the reserve bank of australia must consider the economic interests of the interior and north and the south eastern seaboard since monetary policy cannot differentiate between regions there is a need for interregional macroeconomic risk sharing

exchange rate volatility exchange rate regime and trade volume evidence from the uk us export function 1889 1999 abstract this paper investigated the impact of exchange rate volatility and exchange rate regime on the british exports to the united states using data for the period 1889 1999 the empirical findings suggest that neither exchange rate volatility nor the different exchange rate regimes that spanned the last century had an effect on export volume

from eoq towards zi zero inventory zi is a new and powerful concept to improve production efficiency underpinning zi is set up reduction and this paper examines what eventuates when set up costs are cut the folklore is that set up reduction lowers inventory and costs we obtain results contrary to that reducing set up costs need not reduce inventory for example likewise lowering set up costs need not necessarily lower total production and inventory costs furthermore most investments produce marginally decreasing returns set up cost reduction prompts the opposite it produces marginally increasing not decreasing returns a parametric algorithm that calculates the benefit of set up cost reduction is provided most presentations of zi have been descriptive with very few mathematical models of it yet untaken by modeling certain zi concepts mathematically we scrutinize their validity and sometimes invalidity

rating the raters are reputation concerns powerful enough to discipline rating agencies abstract credit rating agencies cras are accused of bearing a strong responsibility for contributing to the subprime crisis by having been deliberately too lax in the ratings of some structured products in response to this accusation cras argue that such an attitude would be too dangerous for them since their reputation is at stake the objective of this article is to examine the validity of this argument within a formal model are reputation concerns sufficient to discipline rating agencies we show that the reputation argument only works when a sufficiency large fraction of the cra income comes from other sources than rating complex products by contrast when rating complex products becomes a major source of income for the cra we show that it is always too lax with a positive probability and inflates ratings with probability one when its reputation is good enough we provide some empirical support for this prediction by showing that ceteris paribus the proportion of subprime residential mortgage backed securities rmbs that were rated aaa by the three main cras indeed increased over the last eight years we analyze the policy implications of our findings and advocate for a new business model of cras that we call the platform pays model

effects of exchange rate variations on bilateral trade with a vehicle currency evidence from china and singapore abstract using a testable gravity type bilateral trade model derived from an underlying demand and supply model this paper explores the effects of exchange rate variations on bilateral trade in an exchange rate regime with a vehicle currency the introduction of the vehicle currency allows us to figure out whether variations in the trade volume due to the fluctuation of the bilateral exchange rate are primarily due to changes in demand or in supply or both more specifically in this theoretical framework the appreciation of one country s currency against the vehicle currency is expected to promote its imports but the effect of revaluation of the country s currency against the vehicle currency on its exports is ambiguous moreover high volatility of the exchange rate of one country s currency against the vehicle currency is also expected to depress its import volume from the empirical point of view the decomposition of the bilateral exchange rate of two currencies into the bilateral rates of these two currencies against the vehicle currency provides a new alternative to avoid the econometric problem of potential reverse causality in assessing the effects through compiling a novel monthly bilateral trade dataset between china and singapore over 21 years or 252 months we empirically test the predictions of our model which get robust support from the results

ratings quality over the business cycle credit rating agencies cras have long held that reputational concerns discipline their behavior the value of reputation however depends on economic fundamentals that vary over the business cycle in a model of ratings incorporating endogenous reputation and a market environment that varies we find that ratings quality is countercyclical specifically a cra is more likely to issue less accurate ratings when fee income is high competition in the labor market for analysts is tough and securities default probabilities are low persistence in economic conditions can diminish our results while mean reversion exacerbates them the presence of naive investors reduces overall quality but quality remains countercyclical finally we demonstrate that competition among cras yields similar results

international trade and exchange rate volatility for currencies with well developed forward markets several papers have investigated the conjectured negative relationship between trade and short term exchange rate volatility without being very successful a theoretical explanation for the empirical anomalies is provided by solving explicitly for the forward rate because importers and exporters are on opposite sides of the forward market so is their exposure towards exchange rate volatility moreover which trade flow benefits and which one loses from increased volatility is determined by the signs of the aggregate net foreign currency exposure and the aggregate measure of risk aversion

the impact of macroeconomic surprises on spot and forward foreign exchange markets abstract this paper evaluates the effects of surprises in 23 types of macroeconomic announcements on foreign exchange rates and on the forward premium several findings emerge first as in the balance of payment framework announcements that convey a decline in consumer demand increase foreign exchange rates second the ppp hypothesis is rejected in favor of portfolio balance effects in determining exchange rates third the behavior of forward premiums is consistent with covered interest rate parity fourth exchange rates respond to announcements related to consumer demand inflation and interest rates but not to the announcements directly related to the general strength of the economy finally among the news releases considered surprises in the treasury budget trade balance and capacity utilization have the strongest influence in the currency market

modelling the u s sovereign credit rating this paper proposes a new methodology for generating sovereign credit ratings these are determined by mapping the probability that the debt gdp ratio might exceed a maximum debt limit at some point in the future into a credit rating the debt limit can be either ad hoc or based on the financial ability of a government to change fiscal policy in the future to meet its outstanding obligations when applied to quarterly u s data from 1970 to 2011 two clear instances are found in which the u s sovereign credit rating would have been downgraded on this basis during the 1970s oil crisis and in the aftermath of the lehman collapse in 2008 this result is robust to several alternative views on the maximum borrowing capacity of the u s economy

on crises contagion and confusion abstract since the tequila crisis of 1994 1995 the asian flu of 1997 and the russian virus of 1998 economists have been busy producing research on the subject of contagion yet few studies have examined empirically through which channels the disturbances are transmitted if there are indeed fundamental reasons for the spillovers we observe we attempt to fill this gap by analyzing how both trade links and the largely ignored financial sector links influence the pattern of fundamentals based contagion we examine the role of international bank lending the potential for cross market hedging and bilateral and third party trade in the propagation of crises

a guide to choosing absolute bank capital requirements resampling implementation of a stress scenario approach to estimating portfolio default loss distributions is proposed as the basis for estimates of the appropriate absolute level of economic capital allocations for portfolio credit risk estimates are presented for stress scenarios of varying severity and implications of different time horizons are analyzed results for a numeraire portfolio are quite sensitive to such variations although the analysis is framed in terms of recent proposals to revise regulatory capital requirements for banks the arguments and results are also relevant for bankers making capital structure decisions

a multinomial logit approach to exchange rate policy classification with an application to growth we model a country s de jure exchange rate policy as the choice from a multinomial logit response conditioned on the volatility of its bilateral exchange rate the volatility of its international reserves and the volatility of its effective exchange rate the category with the highest predictive probability implied by the logit regressions serves as our de facto exchange rate policy an empirical investigation into the relationship between the de facto classifications and gdp growth finds that growth is higher under stable currency value policies for non industrialized countries a more nuanced characterization of exchange rate policy finds that those who exhibit fear of floating experience significantly higher growth

debt and depression we examine the effect of household financial indebtedness on psychological well being using a large household survey of families with children in britain existing studies that find a link between debt and depression tend to utilise small and highly selective samples of people and only self reported measures of financial stress responses to which are likely to correlate with subjective measures of health from additional household data we can construct a variety of objective quantitative measures of financial stress in order to validate self reported measures we show that although there is a positive association between subjective measures of financial well being and psychological well being individuals differ in their psychological response to objective household financial situations we also examine how the potential simultaneity of financial and psychological health might be handled

growth and exchange rate volatility a panel data analysis the aim of this article is to assess the role of real exchange rate rer volatility on long run economic growth for a set of 82 advanced and emerging economies using a panel data set ranging from 1970 to 2009 with an accurate measure for exchange rate volatility the results for the two step system generalized method of moments gmm panel growth models show that a more less volatile rer has a significant negative positive impact on economic growth the results are also robust for different model specifications

moral hazard and information sharing a model of financial information gathering agencies we propose a theory of information gathering agencies in a world of informational asymmetries and moral hazard in a setting in which true firm values are certified by screening agents whose payoffs depend on noisy ex post monitors of information quality the formation of information gathering agencies groups of screening agents is justified on two grounds first it enables screening agents to diversify their risky payoffs second it allows information sharing the first effect itself is insufficient despite the risk aversion of screening agents and the stochastic independence of the monitors used to compensate them this paper develops a model that explains the formation of financial institutions which acquire and process information for the purpose of certifying asset qualities but do not get involved in funding the model makes two basic assumptions the first is that there is an informational asymmetry in the capital market involving insiders possessing more accurate information about the true economic values of their firms than outsiders and the second is that those engaged in the production of information to rectify this asymmetry can gain from sharing their information examples of the information gathering agencies iga s we study are creditrating agencies financial newsletters standard and poor s value line investment counselors credit bureaus etc iga s are distinct from funding financial intermediaries ffi s like banks and credit unions that in addition to acquiring and processing information also issue claims against themselves fund their customers needs and transform asset characteristics from a modeling standpoint a key distinction between iga s and ffi s is that in the case of the latter outsiders depositors for instance do not necessarily have to assess the quality of the intermediary s information since the intermediary can be made accountable for this quality through the positions it takes in the screened assets thus models that explain ffi s focus on how the contracts offered by the intermediary ensure information reliability without reliance on explicit monitoring on the other hand because of the absence of loan and deposit type contracts to dissipate informational problems a model explaining iga s must rely on monitoring related mechanisms

dynamic correlation analysis of financial contagion evidence from asian markets we apply a dynamic conditional correlation model to nine asian daily stock return data series from 1990 to 2003 the empirical evidence confirms a contagion effect by analyzing the correlation coefficient series we identify two phases of the asian crisis the first shows an increase in correlation contagion the second shows a continued high correlation herding statistical analysis of the correlation coefficients also finds a shift in variance during the crisis period casting doubt on the benefit of international portfolio diversification evidence shows that international sovereign credit rating agencies play a significant role in shaping the structure of dynamic correlations in the asian markets

capital market development and firm restructuring during an economic shock we conceptualize capital markets in terms of resource access and governance and argue that more developed capital markets facilitate firm restructuring through more effective provision of capital and governance of transactions we then develop a contingency model that specifies that the effects of capital market development on restructuring vary by 1 types of restructuring 2 the nature of the economic environments and 3 firms access to resources we evaluate a broad range of restructuring actions among independent firms and business group affiliates in singapore and south korea before and during the economic shock of 1998 1999 results support our predictions of the impact of capital market development and of contingencies and highlight the value of incorporating an external capital markets perspective to complement internally focused theoretical explanations for firm restructuring

exchange rate volatility and export performance a cointegrated var approach during the last decades norwegian exporters have despite various forms of exchange rate targeting faced a rather volatile exchange rate which may have influenced their behaviour recently the shift to inflation targeting and a freely floating exchange rate has brought about an even more volatile exchange rate we examine the causal link between export performance and exchange rate volatility across different monetary policy regimes within the cointegrated vector autoregression var framework using the implied conditional variance from a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity garch model as a measure of volatility although treating the volatility measure as either a stationary or a nonstationary variable in the var we are not able to find any evidence suggesting that export performance has been significantly affected by exchange rate uncertainty we find however that volatility changes proxied by blip dummies related to the monetary policy change from a fixed to a managed floatin

noncognitive abilities and financial distress evidence from a representative household panel this paper provides evidence of how noncognitive abilities affect financial distress in a representative panel of households we find that people in the bottom quintile of noncognitive abilities are 10 times more likely to experience financial distress than those in the top quintile we provide evidence that this relation largely arises from worse financial choices and lack of financial insight by low ability individuals and reflects differential exposure to income shocks only to a lesser degree we mitigate endogeneity concerns using an iv approach and an extensive set of controls implications for policy and finance research are discussed received september 24 2017 editorial decision september 26 2018 by editor stijn van nieuwerburgh authors have furnished an internet appendix which is available on the oxford university press web site next to the link to the final published paper online

a century of evolution from harris s basic lot size model survey and research agenda abstract determining the economic lot size has always represented one of the most important issues in production planning this problem has long attracted the attention of researchers and several models have been developed to meet requirements at minimum cost in this paper we explore and discuss the evolution of these models during one hundred years of history starting from the basic model developed by harris in 1913 up to today following harris s work a number of researchers have devised extensions that incorporate additional considerations the evolution of eoq theory strongly reflects the development of industrial systems over the past century here we outline all the research areas faced in the past by conducting a holistic analysis of 219 selected journal papers and trying to give a comprehensive view of past work on the eoq problem finally a new research agenda is proposed and discussed

ratings assignments lessons from international banks this paper estimates ordered logit and probit regression models for bank ratings which also include a country index to capture country specific variation the empirical findings provide support to the hypothesis that the individual international bank ratings assigned by fitch ratings are underpinned by fundamental quantitative financial analyses also there is strong evidence of a country effect our model is shown to provide accurate predictions of bank ratings for the period prior to the 2007 2008 banking crisis based upon publicly available information however our results also suggest that quantitative models are not likely to be able to predict ratings with complete accuracy furthermore we find that both quantitative models and rating agencies are likely to produce highly inaccurate predictions of ratings during periods of financial instability

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 volatility and international trading strategy abstract it is usually argued that an increase in exchange rate volatility reduces the volume of international trade as trading firms are risk averse this paper shows that exporting firms benefit under fairly general conditions from an increase in exchange rate volatility firms optimally adjust their export volumes to the level of the exchange rate exporting is an option which is exercised if profitable in addition the paper presents conditions under which the volume of international trade grows with exchange rate volatility

the impact of exchange rate volatility on brazilian manufactured exports the purpose of this paper is to examine the relation between exchange rate volatility and the volume of exports using brazilian data after establishing the existence of cointegration among the variables included in our model we estimated the long run coefficients by means of an auto regressive distributed lag ardl model our results show that exchange rate volatility had a significantly negative effect on brazilian manufactured exports in the period 1986 2002

the household bankruptcy decision personal bankruptcy filings have risen from 0 3 percent of households per year in 1984 to around 1 35 percent in 1998 and 1999 transforming bankruptcy from a rare occurrence to a routine event lenders lost about 39 billion in 1998 due to personal bankruptcy filings but economists have little understanding of why households file for bankruptcy or why filings have increased so rapidly until very recently studying the household bankruptcy decision was very difficult because no household level data set existed that included information on bankruptcy filings in this paper we use new data from the panel study of income dynamics which includes information on bankruptcy filings to estimate a model of households bankruptcy decisions we find support for the strategic model of bankruptcy which predicts that households are more likely to file when their financial benefit from filing is higher our model predicts that an increase of 1 000 in households financial benefit from bankruptcy would result in a 7 percent increase in the number of bankruptcy filings our model also predicts that if the 1997 national bankruptcy review commission s proposed changes in bankruptcy exemption levels were implemented there would be a 16 percent increase in the number of bankruptcy filings each year but if the 100 000 cap on homestead exemptions recently passed by the u s senate were adopted our model predicts that there would be only a negligible effect on the number of filings we find little support for the nonstrategic model of bankruptcy which predicts that households file when adverse events occur which reduce their ability to repay finally controlling for state and time fixed effects our model shows that households are more likely to file for bankruptcy if they live in districts with higher aggregate filing rates

exchange rates and traded goods prices abstract this paper presents a partial equilibrium model of the determination of domestic and export prices by a monopolistic competitive firm the model stresses the role of exchange rate uncertainty and expectations the most important result of the analysis is that the stochastic properties of deviations from the law of one price are crucially affected by the currency of denomination of export prices using data on domestic and dollar export prices of japanese goods i find that deviations from the law of one price are due to exchange rate surprises but also to price staggering and ex ante price discrimination

an analysis and critique of the bis proposal on capital adequacy and ratings abstract this paper examines two specific aspects of stage 1 of the bank for international settlement s bis s proposed reforms to the 8 risk based capital ratio we argue that relying on traditional agency ratings could produce cyclically lagging rather leading capital requirements resulting in an enhanced rather than reduced degree of instability in the banking and financial system despite this possible shortcoming we believe that sensible risk based weighting of capital requirements is a step in the right direction the current risk based bucketing proposal which is tied to external agency ratings or possibly to internal bank ratings however lacks a sufficient degree of granularity in particular lumping a and bbb investment grade corporate borrowers together with bb and b below investment grade borrowers severely misprices risk within that bucket and calls at a minimum for that bucket to be split into two we examine the default loss experience on corporate bonds for the period 1981 1999 and propose a revised weighting system which more closely resembles the actual loss experience on credit assets

contagion and trade why are currency crises regional abstract currency crises tend to be regional they affect countries in geographic proximity this suggests that patterns of international trade are important in understanding how currency crises spread above and beyond any macroeconomic phenomena we provide empirical support for this hypothesis using data for five different currency crises in 1971 1973 1992 1994 and 1997 we show that currency crises affect clusters of countries tied together by international trade by way of contrast macroeconomic and financial influences are not closely associated with the cross country incidence of speculative attacks

do sovereign rating announcements affect emerging market exchange rate correlations a multivariate dcc garch approach abstractthis article investigates the effects of sovereign credit rating announcements on time varying exchange rate return correlations for a sample of 11 emerging market countries over the period 2002 2015 the data set covers daily exchange rates and long term foreign currency sovereign ratings outlooks and watch list the pairwise time varying correlations are derived by corrected dynamic conditional correlation cdcc modelling which is a member of multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity garch models family furthermore to capture the global factor effect a dynamic weighted index is created by using dynamic principal component dpc analysis findings suggest that some of the emerging market exchange rate co movements are affected by rating announcements upgrades of moody s and downgrades of fitch lead to spillovers main source of these spillovers are sovereign credit rating changes of european countries especially czech republic and turkey countries with high

nominal exchange rate regimes and the real exchange rate abstract two assumptions about the real exchange rate are common in the literature on international finance 1 the real exchange rate is a random walk 2 the time series properties of the real exchange rate depend on the nominal exchange rate regime this paper presents evidence that indicates that the random walk behavior of the real exchange rate is only a characteristic of the post world war ii period moreover our findings also suggest that what is crucial to the real exchange rate behavior is the particular historical period rather than the nominal exchange rate arrangement

fixed versus flexible lessons from ems order flow abstract we extend the literature on regime dependent volatility in two ways first our microstructural model provides a qualitatively new explanation second we test implications of our model using europe s recent shift to rigidly fixed rates ems to emu in the model shocks to order flow induce more volatility under flexible rates because the elasticity of speculative demand is endogenously low leading to pronounced portfolio balance effects new data on ff dm transactions show that order flow had persistent effects on the exchange rate before emu parities were announced after announcement the ff dm rate was decoupled from order flow as the model predicts

exchange rate volatility international trade and the value of exporting firms abstract increased exchange rate volatility positively affects the value of exporting firms via the price and volume impacts of exchange rates and also makes an exporting strategy more attractive relative to the direct investment investment in export production capacity could therefore be a positive function of exchange rate volatility firms would also be more willing to sustain losses i e to engage in dumping before they abandon their export markets the effect on the volume and value of trade is ambiguous

holding costs under push or pull conditions the impact of the anchor point holding costs are traditionally determined from the investment in physical stock during a cycle an alternative approach instead derives holding costs from net present value npv functions it is known that applying both frameworks to the same system can lead to different holding cost valuations but little explanation has been offered by introducing the anchor point in a model this paper shows for four different systems that traditional holding cost models implicitly assume pull conditions while current npv approaches model push conditions this explains in part the differences between the methods it is shown that the anchor point concept allows the construction of npv models under pull conditions giving results in better correspondence with traditional models the traditional framework is restricted to pull conditions and important considerations could be easily overlooked leading to wrong valuations of holding costs npv seems superior as such considerations are automatically incorporated the application to multi echelon inventory systems provides interesting insights on the roles of echelon stocks and lead times and offers potential for future research

credit risk in private debt portfolios default loss severity and average loss rates for a large sample of privately placed bonds are presented and compared with loss experience for publicly issued bonds the chance of very large portfolio losses is estimated and some determinants of such losses are analyzed results show ex ante riskier classes of private debt perform better on average than public debt both diversification and the riskiness of individual portfolio assets influence the bad tail of the portfolio loss distribution private placements are similar to corporate loans in that both are monitored private debt the results are thus relevant to management and securitization of private debt portfolios generally more than half of nonfinancial corporate debt finance is iss ued privately and decisions of the financial intermediaries that invest in such debt depend importantly on its credit risk regulators of such institutions are similarly attentive to portfolio credit risk and it is an important consideration in the design of securitizations of pools of private debt in spite of its importance little is known empirically about private debt credit risk especially ex ante risk as a function of portfolio characteristics many studies have examined the loan portfolio performance of banks thrifts and insurance companies but the ex ante risk characteristics of the portfo

credit ratings and the bis capital adequacy reform agenda abstract in this paper we have revised and updated our earlier study in order to analyze the most recent second draft of the bis s proposed reforms of bank capital requirements we conduct monte carlo experiments using data on defaults and severity rates on publicly traded us corporate bonds over the 1981 1999 period analyzing the whole period and various sub periods it is clear that the most recent draft of the bis proposed reforms seriously overestimates the relative riskiness of high quality debt relative to low quality debt in the so called standardized model as a result the most recent proposal still contains inherent risk shifting taking incentives for banks

conditional exchange rate volatility and the volume of international trade evidence from the early 1900s exports from britain to the united states from 1900 to 1940 are examined to ascertain the effect of exchange rate volatility on the volume of trade in addition to using a rolling standard deviation measure of exchange rate uncertainty the conditional variance of the exchange rate series modeled as a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic process is used to generate an alternative measure of exchange rate uncertainty the results of estimation using the two measures of exchange rate volatility suggest that increases in the volatility of the real exchange rate reduce the volume of trade copyright 1992 by mit press

investing in reduced setups in the eoq model this paper is motivated by the observation that the japanese have devoted much time and energy to decreasing setup costs in their manufacturing processes and that there has been little in the way of a formal framework available to use to think about such efforts the object of this paper is to begin to provide such a framework the framework developed identifies only one aspect of the advantages of reducing setups namely reduced inventory related operating costs the other advantages such as improved quality control flexibility and increased effective capacity are not accounted for in this paper nevertheless substantial reductions in setups may be warranted based solely on the benefits identified in this paper the approach taken here introduces an investment cost associated with changing the current setup level and adds a per unit time amortization of this cost to the other costs identified in the standard eoq model the general problem becomes that of minimizing the sum of a convex and a concave function in two special cases the minimization can be carried out explicitly in one of these cases numerous interpretations of the results are made including comparisons of japanese and american practices for example holding other parameters constant there is a critical sales level such that investment is made in reducing setups if and only if the sales rate is above that level when such investment is made the optimal lot size is independent of the sales rate the paper also addresses the joint selection of the setup cost and the sales rate selection of the sales rate is seen as incorporating explicit production and holding costs into the classical monopolist s pricing problem an explicit solution is obtained for the model postulated

will a shrink make you richer gender differences in the effects of psychotherapy on labour efficiency this paper provides a first theoretical and empirical analysis of the effects of psychotherapy on individual productivity we build a simple model in which a deterioration of mental health endogenously causes a decrease in productivity which is counterbalanced by psychotherapy we test our hypotheses on the british household panel survey data we find that individuals suffering from mental health problems benefit economically from consulting a psychotherapist moreover we find that the returns are higher for men than for women even though women are more likely to seek help

rating the rating agencies anticipating currency crises or debt crises abstract we revisit the question whether sovereign ratings predict financial crises in line with previous studies we find that ratings do not predict currency crises and are instead downgraded ex post however the likelihood of currency crisis and the implied probability of sovereign default are not closely linked in emerging markets post 1994 when debt crises are defined as sovereign distress when spreads are higher than 1000 basis points or 10 percentage points we find that access to international capital markets is reduced by half in addition although sovereign distress events last for typically 5 2 consecutive months they can persist for longer periods up to nine quarters finally lagged ratings and ratings changes including negative outlooks and credit watches are useful in anticipating sovereign distress

note can a reduction in set up costs indeed increase total costs zangwill zangwill w i 1987 from eoq towards zi management sci 33 1209 1223 has constructed an example which purports to show that reducing set up costs can increase total cost we show that this happened as a result of restricting the policies to be of a greedy nature the expected cost of truly optimal policies is shown not to increase

the impact of exchange rate volatility on international trade flows despite the best efforts of economists a basic paradox as to the impact of exchange rate volatility on trade flows remains unresolved at both the theoretical and empirical level this paper surveys the vast literature in the area in an attempt to identify major issues which have contributed to the development of the debate and examine whether any general direction for consensus may be found

does the source of capital affect capital structure prior work on leverage implicitly assumes capital availability depends solely on firm characteristics however market frictions that make capital structure relevant may also be associated with a firm s source of capital examining this intuition we find firms that have access to the public bond markets as measured by having a debt rating have significantly more leverage although firms with a rating are fundamentally different these differences do not explain our findings even after controlling for firm characteristics that determine observed capital structure and instrumenting for the possible endogeneity of having a rating firms with access have 35 more debt copyright 2006 oxford university press

home is where the equity is mortgage refinancing and household consumption applying a permanent income model with exogenous liquidity constraints and mortgage behavior household refinancing when mortgage interest rates are historically high and rising a persistent empirical puzzle is explained using data from the panel study of income dynamics households experiencing an unemployment shock and having limited initial liquid assets to draw upon are shown to have been 25 more likely to refinance 1991 94 on average such liquidity constrained households converted over two thirds of every dollar of equity they removed into current consumption as mortgage rates plummeted 1991 94 producing an estimated expenditure stimulus of at least 28 billion

the effects of exchange rate variability on international trade a meta regression analysis the trade effects of exchange rate variability have been an issue in international economics for the past 30 years the contribution of this article is to apply meta regression analysis mra to the empirical literature on average exchange rate variability exerts a negative effect on international trade yet mra confirms the view that this result is highly conditional by identifying factors that help to explain why estimated trade effects vary from significantly negative to significantly positive mra evidence on the pronounced heterogeneity of the empirical findings may be instructive for policy first by establishing that average trade effects are not sufficiently robust to generalize across countries and second by suggesting the importance of hedging opportunities hence of financial development for trade promotion for the practice of mra we make a case for checking the robustness of results with respect to estimation technique model specification and sample

debt and depression causal links and social norm effects individuals exhibiting problems repaying their debt obligations also exhibit much worse psychological health selection into problem debt on the basis of poor psychological health accounts for much of this difference the causality between problem debt and psychological health may be two way using individual level uk panel data local house price movements exogenous to individual households are used to establish the causality from problem mortgage debt to psychological health in addition the social norm effects of problem debt are investigated using local bankruptcy and repossession rates results indicate there are sizeable causal links and social norm effects in the debt psychological health relationship language en