Fear of Appreciation and Current Account Adjustment

This paper finds that limited exchange rate flexibility in the form of “fear of appreciation” significantly slows adjustment of current account imbalances, providing novel support for Friedman’s conjecture regarding exchange-rate flexibility. We present a new stylized fact: floaters have faster convergence than peggers for current account deficits, but not so for surpluses. A striking implication is that current account surpluses are more persistent than deficits on average. We provide evidence that this asymmetry is associated with a one-sided muting of exchange rate appreciations. We develop a multi-country DSGE model augmented with an asymmetric exchange rate policy to represent fear of appreciation; when solved to a third-order approximation, it can explain greater persistence of current account surpluses compared to deficits