Although EME central banks actively intervene in currency markets, there is a long-running debate as to its effectiveness in affecting exchange rates. In this study, we use unique daily data on currency interventions in Mongolia to analyze the impact of these interventions on the changes in the...

The literature on uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) shows two empirical puzzles. One is the failure of UIP, and the other is the unstable coefficients in the UIP regression. We propose a time-varying coefficients model with stochastic volatility and US structural shocks (TVC-SVX) to study how...

Along the lines of the treatment effects literature, this paper empirically revisits the issue of the so-called “intervention effect”, i.e., the effectiveness of official foreign exchange intervention on the movement of the exchange rate. We extended in a continuous treatment setting the...

This paper quantifies the relative contribution of domestic, regional and international factors to the fluctuation of domestic output in six key Latin American (LA) countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru. Using quarterly data over the period 1980:1-2003:4, a multi-variate,...

We examine import prices paid by direct-sourcing Indian manufacturing firms in the early 2000s using a unique data set that matches firm characteristics with product and source-country trade data, offering a theoretical and empirical extension of Halpern and Koren (2007). We find that import...

The beginning of the twentieth century provides a unique opportunity to explore the interaction of rapid technological progress and trade barriers in shaping the worldwide diffusion of a new, highly traded good: the automobile. We scrape historical data on the quantity and value of passenger...

In a seminal paper, Helpman et al. (2008) demonstrate that accounting for self-selection and firm heterogeneity is crucial for obtaining unbiased estimates in the gravity equation. In this paper, we show how this insight helps solve the trade elasticity puzzle that, hitherto, trade elasticity...

Using a unique dataset on daily foreign exchange intervention and a new methodological framework of a latent factor model of central bank intervention, this paper addresses the effects of intervention in an emerging market. Events in financial markets from 2002 to 2010 provide a natural...

This paper tests the occurrence of rational bubbles in the exchange rate of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (the ‘BRICS' countries group) against the US dollar. We consider bubbles of the periodically recurring variety, and assume that the fundamental value follows a modified PPP...

A fivefold increase in central bank foreign reserves across the globe over the past fifteen years has prompted the question of whether this constitutes a new form of mercantilism. According to this view, countries accumulate foreign reserves in order to support export promotion by influencing...