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This chapter conducts an event study of 30 quantitative easing (QE) announcements made by 21 central banks on daily government bond yields and bilateral US dollar exchange rates in March and April 2020, in the midst of the global financial turmoil triggered by the COVID-19 outbreak. The chapter also investigates the transmission of innovations to long-term interest rates in a standard GVAR model estimated with quarterly pre-COVID-19 data. The authors find that QE has not lost effectiveness in advanced economies and that its international transmission is consistent with the working of long-run uncovered interest rate parity and a large dollar shortage shock during the COVID-19 period. In emerging markets, the QE impact on bond yields is much stronger and its transmission to exchange rates is qualitatively different than in advanced economies. The GVAR evidence that the authors report illustrates the Fed’s pivotal role in the global transmission of long-term interest rate shocks, but also the ample scope for country-specific interventions to affect local financial market conditions, even after controlling for common factors and spillovers from other countries. The GVAR evidence also shows that QE interventions can have sizable real effects on output driven by a very persistent impact on long-term interest rates.

This study seeks to explore the presence and the relative strength of market efficiency in the onshore and offshore Renminbi (RMB) forward markets.

In the onshore and offshore foreign exchange markets, the RMB forward contracts are designed in similar ways. However, the underlying economic forces and regulatory frameworks are very different in these two markets. We first analyze the functioning of each market, by examining the covered interest rate parity (CIRP) conditions. Second, we explore the CIRP deviations in the two markets and quantify the role of market frictions and government interventions.

We find that the CIRP condition does not hold in either the onshore or the offshore RMB forward markets. We also find that the offshore market is more efficient than the onshore market in conveying private information about investors’ expectation.

Our results reveal that the onshore RMB forward market provides an imperfect platform for investors to manage their currency exposures. We suggest that by opening the offshore market to domestic participants and the onshore market to more foreigners, the forward rates may become more informative with a greater investor mix. These liberalization efforts are important steps in the right directions to improve market efficiency in the Chinese FOREX market.

The unstable money demand function over the recent decades may explain the unsatisfactory performance of the exchange rate model. Numerous studies have shown that Divisia money serves as a better variable for a stable money demand function. In this study, Divisia money is used as an alternative money supply in MYR/USD exchange rate determination. This study finds that Divisia money differential, real income differential, relative short-term interest rate and real stock prices affect the MYR/USD exchange rate in the long run. The major implication of this study is that policy-makers could monitor the MYR/USD exchange rate via the money supplies following the principle of Divisia monetary aggregate, which assigns higher weightage to more frequently traded monetary assets.

Long-term interest rates of small open economies (SOE) correlate strongly with the USA long-term rate. Can central banks in those countries decouple from the United States? An estimated Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model for the UK (vis-á-vis the USA) establishes three structural empirical results: (1) Comovement arises due to nominal fluctuations, not through real rates or term premia; (2) the cause of comovement is the central bank of the SOE accommodating foreign inflation trends, rather than systematically curbing them; and (3) SOE may find themselves much more affected by changes in USA inflation trends than the United States itself. All three results are shown to be intuitive and backed by off-model evidence.

Financial integration being an increasingly important part of ongoing trade liberalization requires an in-depth analysis. This study seeks to survey all the available studies that try to measure the magnitude of cross-country integration. We see that primarily there are two types of measure available, viz De jure and De facto. These measures can be further broken down into different subparts which lay emphasis on different aspects of financial integration. We see that there is no accepted single universal index to measure financial integration, each actually having its own pros and cons and it is upon the researcher to use one or more that best fit his/her purpose.

The role of money and monetary policy of the central bank in pursuing macroeconomic stability has significantly changed over the period since the end of World War II. Globalization, liberalization, integration, and transition processes generally shaped the crucial milestones of the macroeconomic development and substantial features of economic policy and its framework in Europe. Policy-driven changes together with variety of exogenous shocks significantly affected the key features of macroeconomic environment on the European continent that fashioned the framework and design of monetary policies.

This chapter examines the key basis of the central bank’s monetary policy on its way to pursue and preserve the internal and external stability of the purchasing power of money. Substantial elements of the monetary policy like objectives and strategies are not only generally introduced but also critically discussed according to their accuracy, suitability, and reliability in the changing macroeconomic conditions. Brief overview of the Eurozone common monetary policy milestones and the past Eastern bloc countries’ experience with a variety of exchange rate regimes provides interesting empirical evidence on origins and implications of vital changes in the monetary policy conduction in Europe and the Eurozone.

This chapter identifies three crisis warning indicators driven from trading in emerging markets’ carry trades, and empirically examines whether these indicators could predict two major financial crises that hit the global financial markets in the last decades — The 1997–1998 Asian crisis and the 2007–2008 global crisis. The probit regression is used to examine the power of the three indicators in forecasting financial crises, using data from eight Asian emerging countries which serve as proxies for emerging markets, independent of the origination of the crisis. I use both fixed effect and random effect estimation to measure crisis impacts. The empirical results show that financial crises could have been predicted. Probit estimation show that carry trade returns can predict a financial crisis, and the estimation results are robust to both panel level and country-level analysis. These three indicators are by no means an exhaustive list of all possible predictors of financial crisis. The literature suggests other fundamental indicators of financial crises such as the current account deficit and foreign debt. However, this chapter cannot fully consider these indicators for lack of data at this point in time. Although financial crisis may be better predicted by the well-known fundamental indicators, the contribution of this chapter is simply that carry trade-related indicators can help in predicting crises.

This paper reviews the thirteen-year record of Open Economies Review (OER), an economics journal specializing in issues of the open economy, both at the micro and macro levels. It first examines the journal’s output – defined by number and type of articles published, location of the authors’ institutional affiliation, recurrent themes, and rejection rates – and then critically assesses the development of big themes in international economics and finance, where OER authors have made a contribution. The main conclusion is that national border represents a big constraint to the expansion of the open economy, a point not lost by OER authors.

In this chapter I characterize the relationship between macroeconomic variables and the terms structure of interest rates using the recent macro-finance approach adapted to the case of an emerging economy and applying it to Brazil. I find that macro variables help to explain the dynamics of the yield curve in emerging markets, specially in periods of high volatility. Moreover, the notion of great external vulnerability of emerging economies is confirmed by the strong role of the nominal exchange rate change, which explains up to 37% of the variation in yields in Brazil. However, the model does a poor job in forecasting yields during the financial crisis of 2008. This fact seems to be related to the strong fall in international commodity and industrial goods prices (in dollar terms), which limited the passthrough from the strong depreciation of the exchange rate to inflation.