Real Exchange Rate Misalignments

This paper investigates episodes of real exchange rate appreciations and depreciations for a sample of 85 countries, from 1960 to 1998. The equilibrium real exchange rate series are constructed by estimating cointegration vectors with fundamentals, and departures from it are obtained. A Markov Switching Model is used to characterize the misalignments series as stochastic autoregressive processes governed by two states corresponding to different means and variances. Three are the main findings: first, some countries present no evidence of distinct regimes for misalignment; second, for some countries, there is no RER misalignment in one the regimes; and, third, for those countries with two misalignment regimes, the appreciated regime have higher persistence than the depreciated one.