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This paper studies the effect of seven types of exchange rate regimes on business cycle synchronization, by using a new dataset on bilateral de-facto exchange rate regimes for the 1973-2016 period. Using the extreme bounds analysis (EBA) methodology, we find that the exchange rate regime is a robust determinant of business cycle synchronization. We find that, compared to country pairs with freely floating arrangements, (i) the correlation coefficient measuring business cycle synchronization is higher by approximately 0.07-0.12 points in countries with no separate legal tenders; (ii) the effect does not always linearly decrease with increasing exchange rate regime flexibility, since the effects of crawling pegs and crawling bands turn out to be insignificant, whereas that of moving bands as a more flexible type of exchange rate regime is positive and significant; and (iii) the effect is stronger for countries with a high degree of financial openness and good institutional quality. The second finding suggests that the role of intermediate exchange rate regimes is more complicated than previously recognized in the literature and deserves more attention. In addition, we find that (iv) the positive effect of interest is more prominent for countries from the high-income group, in contrast to the occasionally negative effect of some regimes for other country pairs, and that (v) specialization and fiscal policy integration are factors that influence the effect of exchange rate regimes on business cycle synchronization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the spillover effects of United States monetary policy on exchange rates of 11 emerging markets and 12 advanced economies during the pre-Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) period of 2019 versus the COVID-19 period of 2020. The investigation was achieved via a structural vector autoregression model, where year-on-year changes in weekly measures of economic activity, exchange rates and policy rates were used. The empirical results suggest evidence for the spillover effects of United States monetary policy for several countries during the pre-COVID-19 period, whereas they have been effective only for certain countries during the COVID-19 period that can be explained by the disease outbreak channel. It is implied that policies keeping the pandemic under control may help mitigate the unforeseen economic effects of the COVID-19 crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's rapidly growing role in the world economy has been accompanied by rising bilateral trade with Australia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN group) as well as expanded offshore renminbi (RMB) markets in the region. Using a Markov-switching analysis that allows for variation across stable and volatile domestic inflation regimes, we find evidence of significant inflation transmission from China to Australia and the five larger ASEAN economies. Chinese inflation effects are further confirmed when we incorporate money supply and commodity price effects within a Markov-switching Vector Autoregressive (MSVAR) framework. The importance of allowing for regime change over our sample period is clear and these inflation effects are shown to generally be stronger during periods when domestic inflation is more volatile. These findings on inflation pass-through from China represent a novel extension to a prior literature that has been primarily limited to real economy and trade effects.

While entrepreneurial ecosystem research has attracted increasing attention in the scholarly literature, research focusing on its structure beyond geographical borders is limited. The aim of this paper is to examine the configuration of the entrepreneurial ecosystem and propose an original model by implementing an international perspective. Specifically, this study combines the following two theoretical streams: the entrepreneurial ecosystem and the international context. An empirical investigation was performed through an exploratory study of key public and private French internationalization support organizations. The findings provide new insights related to 4 axes, i.e., structural, systemic, evolutionary and spatial axes, which are enhanced by the adopted international perspective. This perspective is connected to a glo-cal culture that combines both adaptation to local specificities and global integration. The findings also underline the importance of sub-ecosystem interactions in establishing a consistent and effective long-term entrepreneurial development strategy in a territory. This research provides useful implications for both theory and practice, especially for policymakers and support organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We bring the notion of connectedness (Diebold and Yilmaz, Int J Forecast 28(1):57–66 2012) to a set of two critical macroeconomic variables as inflation and unemployment. We focus on the G7 economies plus Spain, and use monthly data—high-frequency data in a macro setting—to explore the extent and consequences of total and directional volatility spillovers across variables and countries. We find that total connectedness is larger for prices (58.28%) than for unemployment (41.81%). We also identify asymmetries per country that result in higher short-run Phillips curve trade-offs in recessions and lower trade-offs in expansions. Besides, by exploring time-varying connectedness (resulting from country-specific shocks), we find that volatility spillovers magnify in periods of common economic turmoil such as the Global Financial Crisis. Our results call for an enhancement of international macroeconomic policy coordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corruption has a major impact on growth in low-income economies, while ease of doing business has a major impact on growth in developed countries. The study empirically examines the effect of corruption on ease of doing business. The study analyses unbalanced panel data of corruption rank, corruption score, control of corruption, and inflation, together with other economic and financial institutional factors and ease of doing business score for the period of 2004–2017. Results indicate that: corruption rank, inflation, and import have negative and significant effect on ease of doing business; corruption score, control of corruption, lending rate spread, and education (skill level) have positive and significant effect on ease of doing business; gross capital formation and population have insignificant negative effect on ease of doing business; export and gross domestic product have insignificant positive effect on ease of doing business. The random effect model is a consistent and most efficient model, indicating common mean value for ease of doing business for the dataset. The study recommends improved corruption scores, control of corruption, and ranks to encourage ease of doing business through monetary policy and infrastructural facilities.

The Latin American debt crisis consumed the 1980s and was not restricted to Latin America. Starting from the August 1982 Mexican weekend, the crisis had three phases: Concerted Lending (1982-5), Baker Plan (1985-9) and Brady Plan (1989 to mid 1990s). This article describes the evolution of the debt strategy and the road to embracing debt write-downs at the end of the decade. In the absence of an external coordinating mechanism, four groups of parties had to reach agreement on any change in the strategy: the borrowing countries, their commercial bank lenders, the home-country authorities of those lenders, and the International Monetary Fund as the principal international institution. Each group could effectively veto any change in the strategy. This need for consensus is lesson number one from the 1980s for today. Lesson number two is that political economy aspects dictated that the strategy be implemented on a case-by-case basis. The article concludes with an application of these lessons to a similar, but even more global, potential debt crisis in the wake of the COVID pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Markov Tree model is a discrete-time option pricing model that accounts for short-term memory of the underlying asset. In this work, we compare the empirical performance of the Markov Tree model against that of the Black-Scholes model and Heston’s stochastic volatility model. Leveraging a total of five years of individual equity and index option data, and using three new methods for fitting the Markov Tree model, we find that the Markov Tree model makes smaller out-of-sample hedging errors than competing models. This comparison includes versions of Markov Tree and Black-Scholes models in which volatilities are strike- and maturity-dependent. Visualizing the errors over time, we find that the Markov Tree model yields more accurate and less risky single instrument hedges than Heston’s stochastic volatility model. A statistical resampling method indicates that the Markov Tree model’s superior hedging performance is due to its robustness with respect to noise in option data.

In this paper, we trace the transmission of monetary policy shocks from three prominent sources of global financial and trade shocks (US, Europe, and China) to the two largest emerging economies in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (Nigeria and South Africa). To pursue this study's objective, we employ Global Vector Autoregression (GVAR) model and update the common GVAR database to accommodate selected SSA countries. We report impulse response functions obtained from the model to analyse the responses of inflation, exchange rate, interest rate, and output in the emerging SSA economies to monetary policy shocks emanating from the large open economies. We document some new findings on the relationship between international monetary policy and the behaviour of economic factors in the emerging SSA countries. First, we show that tight monetary policy in the US and EU moderates prices in Nigeria while it is inflationary in South Africa. Second, the impact of the same policy shock is positive and prolonged on the Nigerian Naira and South African Rand. Third, the monetary policy decisions in China and the US have greater influence on the monetary policy in Nigeria and South Africa compared to similar policy decisions in the EU.

This paper sheds new light on the degree of international fiscal-financial spillovers by investigating the effect of domestic fiscal policies on cross-border bank lending. By estimating the dynamic response of U.S. cross-border bank lending towards 45 recipient countries to exogenous domestic fiscal shocks (both measured by spending and revenue) between 1990Q1 and 2012Q4, we find that expansionary domestic fiscal shocks lead to a statistically significant increase in cross-border bank lending and the size of the effect is comparable to an exogenous decline in the federal funds rate by about 25 bp (50 bp) for spending (revenue) shocks. The fiscal-financial spillovers we find are independent of changes in monetary policy or financial conditions measured by the VIX. The effects also depend on the sign of the fiscal shocks and the underlying economic conditions of a source country. While capital controls seem to play some moderating role, we do not find systematic and statistically significant differences in the spillover effects across recipient countries, depending on their exchange rate regime. The extension of the analysis to fiscal shocks for a panel of 16 small open economies largely confirms the U.S. economy's findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the conduct of fiscal policy in a financially integrated union in the presence of financial frictions. Frictions create a wedge between the return to investment and the union interest rate. This leads to an over-spending externality. While the social cost of spending is the return to investment, governments care mostly about the (depressed) interest rate they face. In other words, the crowding-out effects of public spending are partly "exported" to the rest of the union. We argue that it may be hard for the union to deal with this externality through the design of fiscal rules, which are bound to be shaped by the preferences of the median country and not by efficiency considerations. We also analyze how this overspending externality—and the union's ability to deal with it effectively—changes when the union is financially integrated with the rest of the world. Finally, we extend our model by introducing a zero lower bound on interest rates and show that, if financial frictions are severe enough, the union is pushed into a liquidity trap and the direction of the spending externality is reversed. At such times, fiscal rules that are appropriate during normal times might backfire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between monetary policy and financial stability has gained importance in recent years as Central Bank policy rates neared the zero-lower bound. We use an SVAR model to study the impact of monetary policy shocks on three proxies for financial stability as well as a proxy for economic growth. Monetary policy is represented by policy rates for the emerging market economies and shadow rates for the advanced economies in our paper. Our main results show that monetary policy may be used to correct asset mispricing, to control fluctuations in the real business cycle and also to tame credit cycles in the majority of cases. Our results also show that for the majority of cases, in line with conventional wisdom, local currencies appreciate following a positive monetary policy shock. Monetary policy intervention may indeed be successful in contributing to or achieving financial stability. The results, however, show that monetary policy may not have the ability to maintain or re-establish financial stability in all cases. Alternative policy choices such as macroprudential policy tool frameworks which are aimed at targeting the financial system as a whole may be implemented as a means of fortifying the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the welfare effects of international monetary policy spillovers at the zero lower bound, focusing on the effects of forward guidance in a large economy ("foreign") on its smaller trading partner ("home") in scenarios motivated by the global financial crisis. We find that foreign forward guidance has an overall prosper‐thy‐neighbor effect on the home economy as long as it increases foreign welfare. This finding holds under alternative assumptions about exchange rate pass‐through or the degree of international financial integration. However, foreign forward guidance may worsen the trade‐off between the stabilization objectives of home monetary policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We empirically study the impact of inflation targeting credibility on business cycle synchronization with G-7 economies. To do this, we use a sample of 15 inflation targeting countries to develop and calculate a reputation-based credibility measure for long- and short-term memory. By using dynamic multipliers through a panel vector autoregressive model, our main findings indicate that greater credibility allows for greater anchoring of inflation expectations by economic agents. This would lead to a greater effectiveness of monetary policy in stabilizing the evolution of prices, allowing the output gap to be more sensitive to external aggregate demand shocks. Therefore, countries with inflation targeting regimes must develop and maintain credibility for their monetary policy if they want to encourage greater interactions with the rest of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that the ECB's unconventional monetary policy announcements have generated significant spillover effects in Russia and Eastern Europe. The hypothesis is tested using OLS estimations of event-based regressions on monetary policy event dummies and seven financial variables in eleven East European countries including Russia. Overall, the empirical results associate the ECB's unconventional policy announcements with the appreciation of East European currencies, rising stock market indices as well as falling long-term government bond yields and lower sovereign CDS spreads in Eastern Europe and Russia. Bilateral integration with the eurozone is a key determinant of the strength of spillovers, with spillovers strongest in non-euro EU countries and weakest in non-EU East European countries. Furthermore, we find differentiated strength of spillovers to Russia compared to other non-EU East European countries, which we attribute to its fixed exchange rate regime. We also argue for the presence of portfolio rebalancing and confidence transmission channels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use the recently created monthly Interest Rate Uncertainty measure, to investigate monetary policy uncertainty across the US, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, UK, Japan, Canada, and Sweden in both the time and frequency domains. We find that the largest spillover indices are from innovations in the country itself; however, there are some instances where spillover indices between countries are large. These relationships change over time and we observe large variances in pairwise spillovers during the global financial crisis. We find that most of the volatility is confined to the crisis period. Policy makers should consider accounting for the spillovers from the US, Germany, France and Spain, as we found that they are the most consistent net transmitters of monetary policy uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using generalised variance decompositions from vector autoregressions, we analyse cross-country, cross-category spillovers of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and financial market volatility between the US and Japan. Our model includes indices of monetary, fiscal and trade policy uncertainty for each country, as well as three measures of option-implied stock market and exchange rate volatility, respectively. We find that the financial market volatility indices are usually substantial net spillover transmitters towards the total group of EPU measures. However, the Japanese equity and especially the FX volatility index are typically more affected by EPU spillovers than the US VXO. Our results also reveal that, compared to within-country spillovers, cross-country spillovers of EPU are relatively small and less volatile. Finally, we show that the direction of net EPU spillovers between the US and Japan is both time- and category-dependent with different EPU categories acting as strong sources of uncertainty spillovers throughout the sample period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the role of US monetary policy in banking crises across the world by using a cross-country database spanning 69 countries over the 1870–2010 period. US monetary policy tightening increases the probability of a banking crisis for those countries with direct linkages to the USA, either in the form of trade links or significant share of USD-denominated liabilities. Conversely, if a country is integrated globally, rather than having a direct exposure, the effect is ambiguous. These findings suggest that the effect of US monetary policy in global banking crises is not uniform and is largely dependent on the nature of linkages with the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how U.S. individuals respond to regulation intended to reduce offshore tax evasion. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) requires foreign financial institutions to report information to the U.S. government regarding U.S. account holders. We first document an average $7.8 billion to $15.3 billion decrease in equity foreign portfolio investment to the United States from tax‐haven countries after FATCA implementation, consistent with a decrease in "round‐tripping" investments attributable to U.S. investors' offshore tax evasion. When testing total worldwide investment out of financial accounts in tax havens post‐FATCA, we find an average decline of $56.6 billion to $78.0 billion. We next provide evidence of other important consequences of this regulation, including increased expatriations of U.S. citizens and greater investment in alternative assets not subject to FATCA reporting, such as residential real estate and artwork. Our study contributes to both the academic literature and policy analysis on regulation, tax evasion, and crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]