Following gains during the 1990s, Canada’s global market share of goods exports has declined markedly in recent years. In this regard, the constant market share analysis framework is used to decompose changes in Canada’s global market share into competitiveness and structural effects over the 1990‐2010 period, as well as to draw some comparisons to a number of other countries.
Topics: Balance of payments and components; Exchange rates; International topicsThis paper studies the sensitivity of Canadian producer prices to the Canada-U.S. exchange rate. Using a unique product-level price data set, we estimate and analyze the impact of movements in the exchange rate on both domestic and export producer prices.
Topics: Exchange rates; Inflation and prices; Market structure and pricingThis article discusses three scenarios for the adjustment of the global economy. In a “baseline” scenario—which encompasses fiscal consolidation in major advanced economies, growth-friendly structural reforms in Europe and Japan, and greater exchange rate flexibility and reforms in the emerging-market economies of Asia to induce rotation of demand away from net exports—global current account imbalances are resolved over the medium term and strong global economic growth resumes. In one alternative scenario, in which these conditions are delayed, global imbalances persist and growth is substantially reduced. In the second alternative scenario, in which advanced economies front-load fiscal consolidation, but no rotation of demand takes place in the emerging-market economies of Asia and no structural reforms are implemented in Europe and Japan, even weaker global economic growth occurs in the near term.
Topics: Balance of payments and components; Exchange rates; Fiscal Policy; International topics; Recent economic and financial developmentsWe construct a multi-country affine term structure model that contains unspanned macroeconomic and foreign exchange risks. The canonical version of the model is derived and is shown to be easy to estimate.
Topics: Asset Pricing; Exchange rates; Interest ratesThe author constructs a measure of foreign activity that takes into account the composition of foreign demand for Canadian exports. It has a number of interesting features.
Topics: Balance of payments and components; Exchange rates; Recent economic and financial developmentsWhen prices are sticky, movements in the nominal exchange rate have a direct impact on international relative prices. A relative price misalignment would trigger an adjustment in consumption and employment, and may help to predict future movements in the exchange rate.
Topics: Exchange rates; International topicsThis paper empirically examines how dispersions across investors beliefs influence traders order submission decisions in the foreign exchange market. Previous research has found that dispersion in traders beliefs regarding future macroeconomic announcements has a significant impact on both price dynamics and trading volume before the announcements in the foreign exchange and other financial markets.
Topics: Exchange rates; Market structure and pricingBuilding on an earlier Review article, the authors critically reassess the premise that exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) has declined in light of recent studies of the issue in the context of a dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium framework. This recent work helps to emphasize the pitfalls of previous studies based on reduced-form models. For example, ERPT to import prices may be larger than the estimated parameters of reduced-form models would indicate. On the other hand, the authors find fairly convincing evidence that measured short-run ERPT to consumer prices has declined because of a shift to more credible monetary policy regimes. In this case, the findings from DSGE models confirm the results from reduced-form models. Insights from recent studies of ERPT based on microdata are examined, and policy implications are discussed.
Topics: Economic models; Exchange rates; Inflation and prices; Monetary policy frameworkIn this paper, we examine how the effect of movements in the real exchange rate on manufacturing plants depends on the plant's placement within the productivity distribution. Appreciations of the local currency expose domestic plants to more competition from abroad as export opportunities shrink and import competition intensifies.
Topics: Exchange rates; Market structure and pricing; ProductivityIn a small open economy fluctuations in the real exchange rate can affect plant turnover, and thus aggregate productivity, by altering the makeup of plants that populate the market. An appreciation of the local currency increases the level of competition in the domestic market as import competition intensifies and export opportunities shrink, forcing less productive plants from the market and compelling new entrants to be more competitive than they otherwise would have been.
Topics: Exchange rates; Market structure and pricing; ProductivityIn theory, nominal exchange rate movements can lead to “expenditure switching” when they generate changes in the relative prices of goods across countries. This paper explores whether the expenditure-switching role of exchange rates has changed in the current episode of significant global imbalances.
Topics: Exchange rates; International topicsSecurity prices contain valuable information that can be used to make a wide variety of economic decisions. To extract this information, a model is required that relates market prices to the desired information, and that ideally can be implemented using timely and low-cost methods.
Topics: Econometric and statistical methods; Exchange rates; Financial marketsWe use a novel approach to identify economic developments that drive exchange rates in the long run. Using a panel of six quarterly U.S. bilateral real exchange rates – Australia, Canada, the euro, Japan, New Zealand and the United Kingdom – over the 1980-2007 period, a dynamic factor model points to two common factors.
Topics: Econometric and statistical methods; Exchange ratesSeveral authors have presented reduced-form evidence suggesting that the degree of exchange rate pass-through to the consumer price index has declined in Canada since the early 1980s and is currently close to zero.
Topics: Exchange rates; Transmission of monetary policyThe paper examines how the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis is affected by a modern variation of the standard model that allows product differentiation (within the traded and nontraded goods sectors) with the number of firms determined exogenously or endogenously.
Topics: Exchange rates; ProductivityCanada played an important role in the postwar establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), yet it was also the first major member to challenge the orthodoxy of the BrettonWoods par value system by abandoning it in 1950 in favour of a floating, market-determined exchange rate.
Topics: Exchange rate regimes; Exchange rates; Monetary policy frameworkAccess to information about the future direction of the exchange rate can be extremely valuable in the foreign exchange market. Evidence presented in this article suggests that Canadian dealers are more likely to provide interday liquidity to foreign, rather than Canadian, financial customers, since foreign financial flows can be more informative about future movements in the exchange rate. The author reveals a statistical relationship between the supply of liquidity provided by non-financial firms and that provided by dealing institutions across time, and across markets, and suggests that the relationship between the positions of commercial clients and market-makers, and the role played by dealers in interday liquidity provision, has been understated in the market microstructure literature.
Topics: Exchange rates; Financial Institutions; Financial markets; Market structure and pricingThis paper illustrates that dealers in foreign exchange markets not only provide intraday liquidity, they are key participants in the provision of overnight liquidity. Dealing institutions receive compensation for holding undesired inventory balances in part from the information they receive in customer trades. These flows can be used to forecast future movements in the exchange [...]
Topics: Exchange rates; Financial markets; Market structure and pricingMcCallum (1994a) proposes a monetary rule where policymakers have some tendency to resist rapid changes in exchange rates to explain the forward premium puzzle.
Topics: Exchange rates; Interest rates; Transmission of monetary policyThe authors examine the impact of the recent run-up in energy and non-energy commodity prices on the Canadian dollar. Using the Bank of Canada's exchange rate equation, they find that the differences between the actual value of the Canadian exchange rate and the simulated values observed in 2007 are not historically large. Still, given that [...]
Topics: Exchange ratesThis paper aims at showing heterogeneity in the degree of exchange rate pass-through to import prices in major advanced economies at three different levels: 1) across destination markets; 2) across types of exporters (distinguishing developed economy from emerging economy exporters); and 3) over time. Based on monthly data over the period 1991–2007, the results show [...]
Topics: Exchange rates; Inflation and pricesThis paper investigates the impact of exchange rate movements on the conduct of monetary policy in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We develop and estimate a structural general equilibrium two-sector model with sticky prices and wages and limited exchange rate pass-through. Different specifications for the monetary policy rule and the real exchange [...]
Topics: Exchange rates; International topics; Monetary policy frameworkThe ongoing process of price discovery in foreign exchange markets provides valuable information to certain market participants. Recent empirical findings suggest that aggregate measures of order flow convey information about the fundamental value of the exchange rate. Using a market microstructure approach, D'Souza reports on a two-year study of completed transactions within the Canadian and Australian exchange rate markets to examine the relationship between exchange rate returns and trades initiated in different locations. Based on the information content of the trades, he finds that geographic location and hours of operation are two of the factors driving informed interdealer trading.
Topics: Exchange rates; Financial markets; Market structure and pricingIn this paper, the author considers whether fundamentals or other factors can explain the yen's ongoing weakness. In particular, the importance of capital outflows due to the carry trade and longer-term portfolio investment outflows, which may be delaying the adjustment of the yen, are investigated. A simple portfolio model is developed, composed of a speculative [...]
Topics: Exchange rates; International topics; Recent economic and financial developmentsNowadays researchers can choose the sampling frequency of exchange rates and interest rates.
Topics: Econometric and statistical methods; Exchange rates
