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Working Paper
Monetary policy in the end-game to exchange-rate based stabilizations: the case of Mexico
Exchange-rate based stabilizations, while useful in accelerating the disinflation process, typically lead to overvalued exchange rates and large current account deficits. These factors, in turn, make it difficult to sustain exchange rate pegs, placing heaving demands upon monetary policy to sustain exchange-rate based programs in their later phases. This paper evaluates the extent to which Mexican monetary policy in 1994 may have loosened, or not tightened sufficiently, in the lead up to the devaluation of the peso that December. Using econometric models of the demand for money, we find ...
Working Paper
How wide is the border?
Previous tests of stock index arbitrage models have rejected the no-arbitrage constraint imposed by these models. This paper provides a detailed analysis of actual S&P 500 arbitrage trades and directly relates these trades to the predictions of index arbitrage models. An analysis of arbitrage trades suggests that (i) short sale rules are unlikely to restrict arbitrage, (ii) the opportunity cost of arbitrage funds exceeds the Treasury Bill rate, and (iii) the average price discrepancy captured by arbitrage trades is small. Tests of the models provide some support for a version of the arbitrage ...
Working Paper
Convertibility risk, default risk, and the Mexdollar anomaly
Rogers (l992a,b) I put forth the convertibility risk hypothesis in order to explain the anomalous n~gative relationship between the expected rate of Mexican peso depreciation and the ratio of Mexdollars to peso denominated demand deposits. Recently, Gruben and Welch (1994) examine the effect of deteriorating bank loan quality on the variables I consider. Using a cointegration framework, the authors find (i) a negative relationship between non-performing loans and the dollarization ratio and (ii) the conventional positive relationship between expected peso depreciation and dollarization. The ...
Working Paper
Identifying the effects of monetary policy shocks on exchange rates using high frequency data
This paper proposes a new approach to identifying the effects of monetary policy shocks in an international vector autoregression. Using high-frequency data on the prices of Fed Funds futures contracts, we measure the impact of the surprise component of the FOMC-day Federal Reserve policy decision on financial variables, such as the exchange rate and the foreign interest rate. We show how this information can be used to achieve identification without having to make the usual strong assumption of a recursive ordering.
Working Paper
How wide is the border?
Failures of the law of one price explain much of the variation in real C.P.I. exchange rates. We use C.P.I. data for U.S. cities and Canadian cities for 14 categories of consumer prices to examine the nature of the deviations from the law of one price. The distance between cities explains a significant amount of the variation in the prices of similar goods in different cities. But, the variation of the price is much higher for two cities located in different countries than for two equidistant cities in the same country. By our most conservative measure, crossing the border adds as much to the ...
Working Paper
Violating the law of one price: should we make a federal case out of it?
We use new disaggregated data on consumer prices to determine why there is variability in prices of similar goods across U.S. cities. We address questions similar to those that have arisen in the international context: is this variability purely a result of market segmentation or do sticky nominal prices play a role? We also examine how the degree of tradability of a good influences price variability. Surprisingly, we find that variability is larger for traded goods. We attribute this finding to greater price stickiness for non-traded goods. Distance between cities accounts for a significant ...
Working Paper
The Effect of the China Connect
We document the effect on Chinese firms of the Shanghai (Shenzhen)-Hong Kong Stock Connect. The Connect was an important capital account liberalization introduced in the mid-2010s. It created a channel for cross-border equity investments into a selected set of Chinese stocks while China's overall capital controls policy remained in place. Using a difference-in-difference approach, and with careful attention to sample selection issues, we find that mainland Chinese firm-level investment is negatively affected by contractionary U.S. monetary policy shocks and that firms in the Connect are more ...
Working Paper
Puzzles in the Chinese stock market
Many companies on China?s stock markets have separate, restricted classes of shares for domestic residents and foreigners. These shares are identical other than who can own them, but foreigners pay only about one-quarter the price paid by domestic residents. We argue that the generally higher level (and volatility) of domestic share prices is consistent with the simplest asset pricing model, assuming plausible differences-about 4 percentage-points-in expected rates of return by foreign and domestic investors. We attribute low Chinese expected returns to the limited alternative investments ...
Journal Article
High inflation: causes and consequences
Using evidence from seven hyperinflationary episodes in four Latin American countries in the second half of the 1980s, John Rogers and Ping Wang examine the causes and consequences of high inflation. The article emphasizes four issues: the welfare costs of inflation and real costs of stabilization, the common features of the chronically high inflations experienced in Latin American countries, the main causes of high inflation, and the widely different outcomes of several stabilization programs. ; Rogers and Wang find that the welfare costs of even moderate periods of inflation may not be ...