Emerging Market Exchange Rates Research Articles

FINANCIAL DOLLARIZATION IN EMERGING MARKETS: AN INSURANCE ARRANGEMENT

AbstractHouseholds in emerging markets hold significant amounts of dollar deposits whereas firms have significant amount of dollar debt. Motivated by perceived dangers, policymakers consider regulations to limit dollarization. I draw attention to an important benefit of dollarization: it serves as an insurance arrangement in which firms provide income insurance. Emerging market exchange rates tend to depreciate in recessions so that households prefer holding deposits denominated in dollars. They effectively starve local financial markets of local currency; raising local interest rates over USD rates and causing entrepreneurs to borrow in dollars. This premium is the price paid by households for insurance.

Overcoming Original Sin

Abstract This paper draws on newly expanded BIS government bond statistics to document how emerging market sovereigns have reduced their reliance on foreign currency denominated bonds since the emerging market crises of the 1990s. With external funding still important for emerging market governments, they have increasingly been able to borrow from foreign investors in their domestic currency. In this respect, emerging market governments are overcoming “Original Sin”. The flipside of these developments is that foreign investors increasingly bear the currency risk associated with fluctuations in emerging market exchange rates, making foreign investors’ portfolio decisions more sensitive to prevailing global financial conditions. Emerging markets thus remain vulnerable to reversals of investor sentiment in bond markets, whether or not they have outstanding debt in foreign currency.

Emerging market exchange rates during quantitative tapering: The effect of US and domestic news

We analyze the impact of domestic and US-based news announcements of a large set of economic and policy-related fundamentals on the US dollar versus the Turkish lira exchange rate from 2013 to 2016. Since exchange rate behavior is closely related to political trust, we also incorporate the effect of domestic and global political uncertainty, using country indices based on Google search results. Contrary to previous findings, our results reveal that surprises related to the domestic economy have a greater effect on the exchange rate compared to surprises related to the US economy. Most important are the surprises related to domestic inflation and monetary policy, as well as foreign employment, while political uncertainty plays a minor role. There is also an asymmetry in the market response. Bad news about the US economy has more impact than good news, and good news about the domestic economy has more impact than bad news.

What drives fluctuations in exchange rate growth in emerging markets – A multi-level dynamic factor approach

Historically, exchange rates in many emerging economies have been volatile. We use a dynamic hierarchical factor model to investigate the driving forces behind these fluctuations in exchange rate growth and find that in recent years, especially since the Great Recession, the common (world) factor has become more important. We also find that, since 2009, US monetary policy and Chinese economic growth have had much greater effects on emerging market exchange rate growth fluctuations. The historical decomposition indicates that 18.8% and 23% of the variations in the world factor after 2009 can be explained by US monetary policy shock and Chinese industrial production shock, respectively.

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 amount of external debt, large current account deficit and speculative grade are more prone to be influenced by announcements on a foreign country’s long-term sovereign rating.

On the directional accuracy of forecasts of emerging market exchange rates

We use survey data to study whether the exchange-rate forecasts made by professional forecasters are informative with respect to the direction of subsequent changes of (Asian, Eastern European, and South American) emerging market exchange rates. While results vary across exchange rates, we find that forecasts often contain information with respect to directional changes of exchange rates. We derive our empirical results using techniques developed to analyze relative operating characteristic (ROC) curves.

Need for Mean Reversion in Forecasting Emerging Market Exchange Rates

A lot of research has been done over the past few decades for arriving at the models which can accurately estimate the exchange rates for currencies. Various approaches including time series analysis, macro-economic factors analysis, analysis using vector algebra and stochastic processes have been considered to estimate the exchange rates. Estimation of exchange rates assumes huge prominence in the present era, where most of the countries have moved to the floating exchange rate regime from the fixed rate regime of the past. Countries across the world consider that the risk due to fluctuations in the exchange rate needs to be minimized because of the huge positions assumed by them. This paper initially provides a brief on some of the major models available in the literature for forecasting exchange rates. It further analyzes the findings available in the literature for the accuracy of the various models and summarizes findings of the various researchers for those models. Further, it tests the model developed using GBM for forecasting USD~GBP and USD~INR exchange rates to assess the need for mean reversion. From the above study, it is concluded that GBM model has some shortcomings in terms of accuracy of the forecasting for the emerging market currencies. Based on the above study, it is proposed that there is a need for mean reversion that needs to be taken into consideration for estimation of the exchange rates for the emerging market currencies.

Reserve option mechanism as a stabilizing policy tool: Evidence from exchange rate expectations

During the recent era, many emerging market economies have implemented unconventional policy measures to mitigate the effect of large swings in short-term capital flows on domestic business cycles. This paper focuses on a novel capital flow management tool, the reserve option mechanism (ROM) introduced by the Central Bank of Turkey, that allows banks to hold a certain fraction of their domestic-currency required reserves in foreign currency. The results suggest that, after the introduction the ROM (i) market expectations leaned towards a significantly lower volatility or skewness in the U.S. dollar/Turkish lira (USD/TL) relative to other emerging market exchange rates; (ii) controlling for a set of domestic and common external factors, the USD/TL expectations have exhibited lower levels of volatility, skewness and kurtosis; (iii) the higher the intensity of ROM (the fraction of ROM-based reserves in total international reserves) the stronger the effect of ROM on exchange rate expectations. Last, we provide evidence that the mechanism acts as an automatic stabilizer of expectations about excessive movements in the exchange rate: the mechanism decreases the sensitivity of expected USD/TL kurtosis to the common external factor (by an estimated decrease of about 85%). In sum, the results provide evidence that the mechanism contains market expectations about excessive fluctuations in the exchange rate, decreasing expected likelihood of an abrupt reversal of capital flows.

ESTIMATION OF AND INFERENCE ABOUT THE EXPECTED SHORTFALL FOR TIME SERIES WITH INFINITE VARIANCE

We study estimation and inference of the expected shortfall for time series with infinite variance. Both the smoothed and nonsmoothed estimators are investigated. The rate of convergence is determined by the tail thickness parameter, and the limiting distribution is in the stable class with parameters depending on the tail thickness parameter of the time series and on the dependence structure, which makes inference complicated. A subsampling procedure is proposed to carry out statistical inference. We also analyze a nonparametric estimator of the conditional expected shortfall. A Monte Carlo experiment is conducted to evaluate the finite sample performance of the proposed inference procedure, and an empirical application to emerging market exchange rates (from October 1997 to October 2008) is conducted to highlight the proposed study.

A Note on Forecasting Emerging Market Exchange Rates: Evidence of Anti‐herding

AbstractUsing survey forecasts of a large number of Asian, European, and South American emerging market exchange rates, we studied empirically whether evidence of herding or anti‐herding behavior of exchange‐rate forecasters can be detected in the cross‐section of forecasts. Emerging market exchange‐rate forecasts are consistent with herding (anti‐herding) if forecasts are biased towards (away from) the consensus forecast. Our empirical findings provide strong evidence of anti‐herding of emerging market exchange‐rate forecasters.

ARFIMA Tests for Random Walks in Exchange Rates in Asian, Latin American and African-Middle Eastern Markets

This article examines fractional processes as alternatives to random walks in emerging foreign exchange rate markets. Sowell's (1992) joint maximum likelihood is used to estimate the ARFIMA parameters and test for random walks. The results show that, in most cases, the emerging market exchange rates follow fractionally integrated processes. Forecasts of exchange rates based on the fractionally integrated autoregressive moving average models are compared to those from the benchmark random walk models. A Harvey, Leybourne and Newbold (1997) test of equality of forecast performance indicates that the ARFIMA forecasts are more efficient in the multi-step-ahead forecasts than the random walk model forecasts. The presence of fractional integration is seen to be associated with market inefficiency in the exchange markets examined. The evidence suggests that fractional integrated processes are viable alternatives to random walks for describing and forecasting exchange rates in the emerging markets.

The Impact of Macroeconomic Announcements on Real Time Foreign Exchange Rates in Emerging Markets

This paper utilizes a unique high-frequency database to measure how exchange rates in nine emerging markets react to macroeconomic news in the U.S. and domestic economies from 2000 to 2006. We find that major U.S. macroeconomic news have a strong impact on the returns and volatilities of emerging market exchange rates, but many domestic news do not. Emerging market currencies have become more sensitive to U.S. news in recent years. We also find that market sentiment could sway the impact of news on these currencies systematically, as good (bad) news seems to matter more when optimism (pessimism) prevails. Market uncertainty also interacts with macroeconomic news in a statistically significant way, but its role varies across currencies and news.

The Impact of Macroeconomic Announcements on Real Time Foreign Exchange Rates in Emerging Markets

This paper utilizes a unique high-frequency database to measure how exchange rates in nine emerging markets react to macroeconomic news in the U.S. and domestic economies from 2000 to 2006. We find that major U.S. macroeconomic news have a strong impact on the returns and volatilities of emerging market exchange rates, but many domestic news do not. Emerging market currencies have become more sensitive to U.S. news in recent years. We also find that market sentiment could sway the impact of news on these currencies systematically, as good (bad) news seems to matter more when optimism (pessimism) prevails. Market uncertainty also interacts with macroeconomic news in a statistically significant way, but its role varies across currencies and news.

Emerging market exchange rate exposure

We estimate the exposure of emerging market companies to fluctuations in their domestic exchange rates. We use an instrumental-variable approach that identifies the total exposure of a company to exchange rate movements, yet abstracts from the influence of confounding macroeconomic shocks. In the sub-period of 1999–2002, we find that depreciations tend to have a negative impact on emerging market stock returns. In the sub-period of 2002–2006, this tendency has largely disappeared. Since we estimate the exchange rate exposure of firms from different countries with a common set of instruments, we can make coherent, cross-country comparisons of their determinants. We find that the impact of various measures of debt on exchange rate exposure, which is negative and significant in the early sub-period, becomes insignificant and even reverses sign in the recent sub-period.

Testing for inefficiency in emerging markets exchange rates

Abstract This paper contributes to the literature on testing the random walk hypothesis by examining multiple variance ratio tests for emerging market exchange rates on a daily and weekly frequency. We have performed these tests using a bootstrap technique, which is robust to heteroscedasticity. We examine countries that have recently adopted floating exchange rate regimes, such as some Asian and Latin American countries, and analyze their recent behavior. Empirical evidence supports the random walk hypothesis on both a daily and weekly frequency. Furthermore, we test for long-range dependence and present evidence of structural breaks in generalized Hurst exponents.

Forecasting Emerging Market Exchange Rates from Foreign Equity Options

AbstractThe use of derivatives to infer future exchange rates has long been a subject of interest in the international finance literature. With the recent currency crises in Mexico, Southeast Asia, and Brazil, work on exchange rate expectations in emerging markets is of particular interest. For some emerging markets, foreign equity options are the only liquid exchange‐traded derivatives with currency information embedded in their prices. Given that emerging markets sometimes undergo currency realignment with discrete jumps in their exchange rate, estimation of risk‐neutral probability density functions from foreign equity option data provides valuable evidence concerning market expectations. To illustrate the use of foreign equity options in estimating market beliefs, we consider Telmex options around the 1994 peso devaluation and find evidence that markets anticipated the change in the Mexican government's foreign exchange policy.

An options-based analysis of emerging market exchange rate expectations: Brazil's Real Plan, 1994–1999

This paper uses currency option data to investigate market expectations on the Brazilian Real–U.S. dollar exchange rate from October 1994 through March 1999. We derive implied probability density functions (PDF) for expected future exchange rates and thus measures of the credibility of the “crawling peg” and target zone regimes governing the exchange rate. Target zone credibility was poor prior to February 1996, improved afterwards through September 1997 and later started to worsen again. The market anticipated periodic band adjustments and estimated distributions are very sensitive to political and economic news affecting the credibility of the regime.