Three Essays On Dynamics Of Real Exchange Rate

This dissertation is comprised of one essay focusing on the measurement of real exchange rate indexes, three chapters on the various impacts of real exchange rate movements on the economy, two essays on the impact of fixed exchange rate regimes on trade, one essay on the long-run impact of trade shocks, and a final chapter on the diffusion of technology along geographic lines. The common theme is that these essays collectively paint a picture of the world in which history casts surprisingly long shadows, as current economic relationships -- trade, employment, productivity, and output -- are the product of history. In the first essay, coauthored with Ju Hyun Pyun, we propose several new methods of computing real exchange rate indices which fix a subtle, but important, index numbers problem apparent in widely-used series created by the Federal Reserve and the IMF, and also control for productivity. Extending one of these indexes historically for the US back to 1820, we uncover a new empirical fact -- that in 2002, the US price level had been higher relative to trading partners than at any time since the worst year of the Great Depression. The next three chapters essay address the issue of the economic impact of RER movements. To identify a causal impact of RER movements on manufacturing, I compare the US experience in the early 2000s to the 1980s, when large US fiscal deficits led to a sharp appreciation in the dollar, and to Canada's experience in mid-2000s, when high oil prices and a falling US dollar led to an equally sharp appreciation of the Canadian dollar. I use disaggregated sectoral data and a difference-in-difference methodology, finding that an appreciation in relative unit labor costs for the lead to disproportionate declines in employment, productivity and output for both the US and Canada. In addition, I find that the impact of a temporary shock to real exchange rates is surprisingly long-lived. In the second of these chapters, I find scant evidence for an impact of adverse trade shocks on inquality in manufacturing, and in the third, I speculate that the collapse in manufacturing caused by tectonic shifts in relative prices are a likely cause of the "secular stagnation'' experienced in the US since 2000. In the fifth and sixth chapters I challenge previous literature which found that currency unions lead to dramatically larger trade flows. I found that this previous literature did not control for the fact that current trade relationships are the product of historical forces -- in this case, that countries with former colonial relationships experienced only a gradual decay of trade ties over time since independence. Adding in a dynamic control for country-pair specific trends in trade patterns, and omitting currency union changes brought on by major geopolitical events such as communist takeovers and ethnic cleansing episodes severely weakened the previous findings in the literature. In the seventh chapter, I look at the long-run impacts of temporary shocks to trade patterns from the world wars. I find, for example, that while UK manufacturers dominated world export markets before WWI, during the war US exporters rose to prominence, but that after the war the UK could then not regain the market share it had previously, even given the relative reduction of UK GDP. In the final chapter, with coauthor Ju Hyun Pyun, we challenge a previous seminal finding in the development literature which found that a country's ``genetic distance'' to the US predicts its per capita GDP, even while controlling for a whole host of other variables. We find, by contrast, that the apparent impact of genetic distance was not robust to the inclusion of two standard geographic controls -- distance from the equator and a dummy for sub-Saharan Africa.

"This thesis explores the relationship between the exchange rate and the domestic price level in three essays. The first essay (Chapter 2) examines the causality between the exchange rate and consumer prices, and estimates the extent of the exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices for 12 OECD countries for the period 1974 to 2016. Using the adoption of the Euro and the adoption of the policy of targeting inflation in these countries, which represent changes in the monetary policy regime, I divide this time period into two groups and examine causality and pass-through behaviour separately for each country. Based on a newly developed causality measure for multiple horizons, I found that the direction of causality from consumer prices to exchange rate becomes stronger for the countries with the Euro while the direction of causality from the exchange rate to consumer prices becomes stronger for the inflation targeting countries after their respective regime change. By deriving the impulse response functions from a recursive vector autoregressive model, I found that the exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices is not statistically different from zero for the countries with the Euro while the pass-through is statistically significant in four out of the six remaining countries. Before the regime change, the evidence on both fronts was somewhat mixed among these two sets of countries. The second essay (Chapter 3) examines whether the aggregate price level responds asymmetrically to exchange rate appreciations and depreciations in 12 Asian countries for the period 1994 to 2016. Using a recently developed response-based test, I found evidence of asymmetric responses of the consumer price index to exchange rate appreciations and depreciations in 6 out of the 12 countries. The slope-based test also provides evidence of asymmetry for 6 countries, but the results are the same as the response-based tests only for 4 countries. Further, depreciations are not necessarily passed-through to prices more than the appreciations. The third essay (chapter 4) examines the purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis for our selected 12 Asian countries for the period 1974 to 2016. Since stationarity of the real exchange rate implies that PPP holds, I employ unit root tests on the real exchange rate in the presence of multiple structural breaks. Our findings support the PPP hypothesis for six countries. Further, there is no additional evidence of trend stationarity of the series in these countries, so that there is no support for the Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis. " --

This dissertation comprises three essays in open economy and international macroeconomics. The first essay investigates the propagation mechanism of real exchange rate shocks to key real sectors that constitute U.S. foreign trade. The analysis is carried out by decomposing the U.S. trade balance into agriculture, manufacturing and services and evaluating how these sectors respond through the monetary policy channel to a shock in the real exchange rate. A VAR model is constructed using quarterly data of the U.S. foreign trade from 1976Q2 to 2005Q1. The results show that a shock to the real exchange rate has a greater impact on manufacturing and services net trade relative to agriculture. Moreover, the results also indicate, at the sectoral level, that exports are more sensitive to the real exchange rate shocks than are imports. These results are important to researchers using dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models of small open economies because they show transmission features of real exchange rate and monetary policy disturbances to key sectoral components of exports, imports and the trade balance. The second essay employs a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework to an open economy setting in order to investigate the mechanism through which the key sectors of agriculture, manufacturing and services are affected by shocks in the real exchange rates. The essay investigates exchange rate movements as deviations from purchasing power parity, disregarding the changes in the prices of non-tradable goods relative to tradable goods among countries. The results suggest that exchange rate movements are a function of structural parameters that constitute the three sectors of agriculture, manufacturing and services such as labor shares and the elasticity of substitution between domestic and foreign goods. The third essay examines the key forces driving innovation among entrepreneurs of ICT (information and communications technology) firms within Bangalore, India0́9s leading software city. The essay employs the multinomial logistic technique on qualitative variables related to education, social strata, experience, and diaspora of Indian software entrepreneurs to show empirically their relevance in explaining Schumpeterian innovation in the Indian software industry. This study not only looks at the impact of years of schooling on innovation, but also the types of education received by an entrepreneur, such as technical or commercial type of education, whether the last degree was received from India or from abroad and whether the entrepreneur attended the Indian Institute of Technology. The empirical results indicate that, the level of education, in terms of number of years of schooling and types of education received by an Indian software entrepreneur are statistically significant in explaining innovation in the Indian software industry. The results also show that, more years of experience in the software industry by an entrepreneur, increases the probability that they become innovators and reduces the likelihood of imitation. Moreover, the likelihood of adaptation is invariant to years of experience in the industry. We also investigate whether exposure to foreign technology increases the likelihood of innovation in the industry by examining three types of diaspora networks, that is, living abroad, working abroad and being a CEO abroad at least 6 months before establishing a software company in India. The results suggest that this foreign exposure increases the likelihood of innovation and reduces imitation and adaptation. Among studies of Indian entrepreneurs examining caste, this study is unique in that caste has no statistical significance in explaining entrepreneurship.