Search results

This article surveys recent developments in the evaluation of point and density forecasts in the context of forecasts made by vector autoregressions. Specific emphasis is placed on highlighting those parts of the existing literature that are applicable to direct multistep forecasts and those parts that are applicable to iterated multistep forecasts. This literature includes advancements in the evaluation of forecasts in population (based on true, unknown model coefficients) and the evaluation of forecasts in the finite sample (based on estimated model coefficients). The article then examines in Monte Carlo experiments the finite-sample properties of some tests of equal forecast accuracy, focusing on the comparison of VAR forecasts to AR forecasts. These experiments show the tests to behave as should be expected given the theory. For example, using critical values obtained by bootstrap methods, tests of equal accuracy in population have empirical size about equal to nominal size.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and analyze impacts of the monetary policy (MP) – money aggregate and interest rate – on the exchange rate in Vietnam.

The study uses data over the period of 2008–2018 and applies the vector autoregression model, namely recursive restriction and sign restriction approaches.

The main empirical findings are as follows: a contraction of the money aggregate significantly leads to the real effective exchange rate (REER) depreciating and then appreciating; a tightening of the interest rate immediately causes the REER appreciating and then depreciating; and both the money aggregate and the interest rate strongly determine fluctuations of the REER.

The quantitative results imply that the MP affects the REER considerably.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the monetary policy transmission mechanism for the Fiji Islands using a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model for the period 1975 to 2005.

The SVAR model investigates how a monetary policy shock – defined as a temporary and exogenous rise in the short‐term interest rate – affects real and nominal macro variables; namely real output, prices, exchange rates, and money supply.

The results suggest that a monetary policy shock statistically significantly reduces output initially, but then output is able to recover to its pre‐shock level. A monetary policy shock generates inflationary pressure, leads to an appreciation of the Fijian currency and reduces the demand for money. The paper also analysed the impact of a nominal effective exchange rate (NEER) shock (an appreciation) on real output and found that it leads to a statistically significant negative effect on real output.

The findings of this study should be of direct relevance to the research and policy work undertaken at the Reserve Bank of Fiji.

For a small economy, such as Fiji, where monetary policy is key to sustainable macroeconomic management, this is the first paper that undertakes a dynamic analysis of monetary policy transmission. The paper uses time series data over three decades and builds a structural VAR model, rooted in theory. This paper will be of direct relevance to the Reserve Bank of Fiji. The approach and model proposed will also be useful for applied monetary policy researchers in other developing countries where inflation rate targeting is a key element of the monetary policy setting.

All over the world, the role of central banks is being redefined following the outbreak of the global financial crisis and subsequent breakdown of the “great moderation” consensus. Consequently, most advanced economies adopted non-conventional approaches of monetary policy which resulted in spill-overs to emerging markets and developing countries with implications on their financial system and monetary policy transmission. This, coupled with, internal developments in the financial systems of developing countries necessitated modifications of not only monetary policy frameworks but also responsibilities of most central banks. This chapter acknowledges possible evolutions of the financial structure variables in developing countries and uses data from Kenya to analyze the dynamic linkages between financial sector variables and monetary policy transmission in the light of the financial crisis. The study used structural vector autoregression to examine the relationship between financial structure variables and monetary policy as well as assess the relative importance of various monetary transmission channels in Kenya. The results show that the changing financial structure represented by credit to the private sector and stock market indicators in Kenya only slightly altered relative importance of monetary policy transmission. The insignificance of credit to the private sector suggests that the importance attached to the bank lending channel in previous studies is waning while the marginal significance of the stock market indicator signals the potential for asset price channel. The results also indicate that the interest rate and exchange rate channels are relatively more important in Kenya while the asset prices is only marginally significant and bank lending channel is the weakest in the intermediate stage of monetary policy transmission. However, transmission of monetary policy to the ultimate objectives is somewhat slow and weak to inflation and almost absent to output. The result implies a limited role of monetary policy on growth and questions the wisdom of pursuing multiple objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the degree of the exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) to the consumer price index (CPI) at both aggregated and disaggregated levels in Vietnam. Updated data of the nominal effective exchange rate (NEER) and bilateral exchange rate (BiER) have been utilized in this study for the comparison purposes.

Advanced time-series approaches such as a structural vector autoregressive framework, structural impulse response functions (SIRFs), and structural forecast-error variance decomposition (SFEVD) are utilized in this paper.

Empirical findings from this paper present an incomplete degree of the ERPT to the aggregated CPI. The ERPT based on the BiER is observed to have substantially larger magnitude than the NEER-based pass-through. For the disaggregated level, the degree of the ERPT varies considerably across sub-components of the CPI, with a higher magnitude of the ERPT elasticity being found from the BiER estimations. The index of housing and construction materials has the largest ERPT based on the BiER, followed by the food and foodstuffs (1.00 and 0.56, respectively). The macroeconomic and financial environments as well as an economic integration into the global market may be the main causes of a higher ERPT in Vietnam in comparison with other ASEAN countries.

The significant and incomplete pass-through of the exchange rate in Vietnam can affect firms’ and households’ budget planning, savings and profits. This finding generally implies that the cost of devaluation of the domestic currency affects the society as the whole in terms of welfare. The State Bank of Vietnam should carefully consider the overall effect of welfares when formulating and implementing strategies of currency devaluation. In addition, the Vietnamese economy becomes more sensitive to external vulnerabilities via changes of the exchange rate during an increasingly economic integration into the global market. In order to maintain inflation stability, it is vitally important to reduce the impact of exchange rate movements on the domestic prices, both aggregated and disaggregated levels, by pursuing either monetary policy credibility or inflation targeting.

Previous studies on the ERPT literature in the Asia region or for emerging countries focus mainly on the aggregated data of the CPI. Previous studies were conducted before the global financial crisis in 2008/2009. The current paper is the first of its kind to examine the pass-through from exchange rates to consumer prices in Vietnam using both aggregated and disaggregated data.

This study aims to investigate the inter-relatedness and the dynamics of banking stability measures and offers answers for some of the related issues such as does financial stability require the soundness of banking institutions, the stability of markets, the absence of turbulence and low volatility? and to what extent the soundness of banking sector in the case of emerging economies can help financial system stability.

This study investigates banking stability by structuring a recursive micro panel vector auto regressive (VAR) model and corroborates the significance of the interrelatedness of the bank-specific variables such as liquidity, asset quality, capital adequacy and profitability by employing a robust panel data drawn from 56 leading banks for a period of 12 years.

A significant contribution of this study is in establishing that liquidity in the banking-dominated financial system is reciprocally related with asset quality, capital adequacy, and profitability of the banking system and in effectively forecasting banking stability employing micro panel recursive VAR model.

The study could be further broadened by employing a macro and structural VAR modelling to forecast banking stability.

This paper is one among the evolving body of literature that underscores the significant relationship between banking system resilience and financial stability in the context of emerging economies dominated with banking systems. Further, the forecast model is able to capture the dynamics of banking stability with greater and appreciable accuracy.

The uniqueness of the study is in modelling banking stability measures in the context of banking-dominated emerging economy financial systems by employing micro panel recursive VAR model by deriving data from 58 leading banks for the period of 12 years from 1996 to 2009 and in offering insights in understanding financial stability with comprehensive literature review.

This paper attempts to examine the transmission of exchange rate changes into the domestic prices together with other important determinants of later, in case of a developing country, namely, India.

In an open economy Philips curve framework, a symmetric model developed by Pesaran et al. (2001) together with a complete asymmetric model developed by Shin et al. (2014) has been applied to assess the transmission of exchange rate changes into the domestic prices (inflation) of India. In addition, non-linear cumulative dynamic multipliers are used to portray the route between disequilibrium position of short run and new long-run equilibrium of the system. The multipliers highlight the asymmetric adjustment paths and/or duration of disequilibrium and therefore add valuable information to the long and short-run asymmetry.

In symmetric framework, exchange rate pass-through is reported to be incomplete and short-run pass through is found to be lower than the long-run pass through. A contractionary monetary policy stance is observed to decrease inflation in the long-run only and in the short-run, a case for price puzzle is observed, although the coefficient is statistically insignificant. Similarly, the impact of output growth is positive in both the short and long-run and both the coefficients are statically significant. Finally, the oil price inflation is also found to escalate the domestic inflationary pressures in both the short and long run, although the pass-through transmission is lower in the short-run than in the long-run. In case of an asymmetric setting, evidence in favour of directional asymmetry is reported whereby long-run impact of currency appreciation is found to be higher than depreciation. Similarly, a contractionary monetary policy action lowers the inflation, the easy one increases it; however, the impact of both the positive and negative changes in interest rate is found to be symmetric. An increase in GR is found to increase the inflation by a relatively appreciable magnitude than is observed when the fall in GR is reported. The possible reason for this asymmetric response of inflation may be explained in terms of asymmetric behaviour of demand conditions during economic upturns and downturns and downward inflexibility of prices. Finally, the transmission of oil price inflation to domestic inflation is also found to be asymmetric. An increase in oil price inflation leads to an increase in domestic inflation by a higher magnitude. whereas a decrease in it lowers inflation only marginally.

From a policy perspective, it is certainly important for the central banks to monitor the exchange rate changes so as to design the appropriate policy actions to resist any inflationary pressures resulting from the external sector. More importantly, a gauge on the factors that lead to destabilizing exchange rate movements or large currency price fluctuations is highly warranted. The results also highlight the relevance of proper domestic demand management and lowering dependence on oil imports to avoid the unnecessary inflation pressures in the economy.

While some studies have explored the possibilities of asymmetric interactions in the case of India, however, these studies have considered only the partial asymmetric model specifications and have not included a well-established theoretical base to include the other potential determinants of inflation as well. In this regard, the authors applied a complete asymmetric model specification developed by Shin et al. (2014) in an open economy Philips curve framework to assess the transmission of exchange rate changes into the domestic prices (inflation) of India. This paper will enrich the existing literature from a viewpoint of a comprehensive analysis of exchange rate pass-through by taking note of potential asymmetries coupled with other important determinants of inflation.

A state space representation of a linearized DSGE model implies a VAR in terms of observable variables. The model is said be non-invertible if there exists no linear rotation of the VAR innovations which can recover the economic shocks. Non-invertibility arises when the observed variables fail to perfectly reveal the state variables of the model. The imperfect observation of the state drives a wedge between the VAR innovations and the deep shocks, potentially invalidating conclusions drawn from structural impulse response analysis in the VAR. The principal contribution of this chapter is to show that non-invertibility should not be thought of as an “either/or” proposition – even when a model has a non-invertibility, the wedge between VAR innovations and economic shocks may be small, and structural VARs may nonetheless perform reliably. As an increasingly popular example, so-called “news shocks” generate foresight about changes in future fundamentals – such as productivity, taxes, or government spending – and lead to an unassailable missing state variable problem and hence non-invertible VAR representations. Simulation evidence from a medium scale DSGE model augmented with news shocks about future productivity reveals that structural VAR methods often perform well in practice, in spite of a known non-invertibility. Impulse responses obtained from VARs closely correspond to the theoretical responses from the model, and the estimated VAR responses are successful in discriminating between alternative, nested specifications of the underlying DSGE model. Since the non-invertibility problem is, at its core, one of missing information, conditioning on more information, for example through factor augmented VARs, is shown to either ameliorate or eliminate invertibility problems altogether.

This paper aims to examine the effects of monetary policy and foreign shocks on output, inflation and exchange rate in Egypt.

This paper studies the effects of monetary policy and foreign shocks on output, inflation and exchange rate by using non-recursive SVAR model and quarterly data.

First, the empirical results reveal that monetary policy shocks, through changes in interest rate or money supply, have a significant effect on output, inflation and exchange rate in Egypt. Second, the world oil prices and foreign output have significant impacts on output, inflation and exchange rate in Egypt, while foreign interest rate has a significant effect on domestic output and inflation.

The limitation of the study is examining one country only.

The Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) should adjust interest rate to stabilize inflation, output and exchange rate. By stabilizing inflation, output and exchange rate, the CBE would be able to achieve the ultimate targets of monetary policy, namely, price stability and economic growth.

It is important for the CBE because it shows the significant effect of monetary policy on macroeconomic variables in Egypt. Also, it is important for people because it shows the important role for the CBE.

It is important for the CBE because it examines the effect of monetary policy and foreign shocks on macroeconomic variables.

Recently, it has been suggested that macroeconomic forecasts from estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models tend to be more accurate out-of-sample than random walk forecasts or Bayesian vector autoregression (VAR) forecasts. Del Negro and Schorfheide (2013) in particular suggest that the DSGE model forecast should become the benchmark for forecasting horse-races. We compare the real-time forecasting accuracy of the Smets and Wouters (2007) DSGE model with that of several reduced-form time series models. We first demonstrate that none of the forecasting models is efficient. Our second finding is that there is no single best forecasting method. For example, typically simple AR models are most accurate at short horizons and DSGE models are most accurate at long horizons when forecasting output growth, while for inflation forecasts the results are reversed. Moreover, the relative accuracy of all models tends to evolve over time. Third, we show that there is no support to the common practice of using large-scale Bayesian VAR models as the forecast benchmark when evaluating DSGE models. Indeed, low-dimensional unrestricted AR and VAR forecasts may forecast more accurately.