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This dissertation research puts a focus on small open economies, whose policies do not affect world prices and interest rates. In the first chapter, it is shown that recent Canadian data from 2001 to 2013 feature a notable procyclical trade balance, which contrasts with the countercyclical trade balance in 1981-2000. By using a dynamic small open economy model built based upon Mendoza's (1991) framework, driven by correlated domestic productivity shocks and world credit spread shocks, I can generate the observed trade balance pattern in the pre-2000 and post-2000 periods. In addition, my analysis shows that the world credit spread shocks explain a large portion of the considerable change in the cyclicality of trade balance, and that the low world real risk-free interest rate after 2000 partially accounts for the procyclical trade balance in the same time period. Applications of the model to other developed small open economies, such as Australia and New Zealand, yield similar results, suggesting that the world credit spread shocks have an impact on macroeconomic dynamics and help improve model performance. The second chapter concerns an innovative exchange rate policy implemented by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA). From 2013 to mid-2015, in order to achieve balanced economic growth, the RBA tried to bring down the Australian dollar by presenting public speeches and monetary policy statements that expressed a strong preference for a lower exchange rate, which is known as jawboning down the currency. To investigate the effectiveness of the central bank's jawboning strategy, I analyze the Australian economy with a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model, in which the Exchange Rate Stance Index (ERSI) is constructed to measure the magnitude of jawboning. The empirical results show that an unanticipated increase in the ERSI, which is equivalent to strengthened jawboning by the RBA, will lead to a significant and lasting fall in the real exchange rate. However, the ERSI shock fails to improve GDP over the medium term, suggesting that the jawboning strategy is not an effective exchange rate policy tool to boost GDP growth. The third chapter investigates how the global and local financial shocks would contribute to the large fluctuations of the unemployment rates in the emerging markets. We use a panel structural vector autoregressive (VAR) model to analyze monthly data from six emerging countries between 1999 and 2015. The results show that the local financial risk factors, including the country spread and the dividend yield, account for a larger portion of unemployment movements than the global financial risks, including the U.S. risk-free real interest rate and the global financial risk proxied by the U.S. Baa corporate spread.
In the second chapter, a model with nominal wage rigidities is combined with the assumption that all goods are traded in the new open economy framework to derive an outcome where the home country has a strong bias towards its own good. Then it is shown that, under broad assumptions of the parameters of the model, overshooting is a consequence when interest elasticity of money demand is less than unity.
This dissertation studies the effects of monetary policy in small open economies. In Chapter 1, I investigate how the openness of banking sector influences the transmission channels of home and international monetary policy shocks in small open economies. For the analysis, I construct a small open economy DSGE model enriched with a globalized banking sector. I consider two forms of bank globalization: international bank capital finance and foreign loan account import. By comparing the effect of each type of bank globalization on monetary policy transmission, the analysis delivers the following results. First, bank globalization leads to a significant attenuation of domestic monetary policy transmission. This is because, in response to home monetary shocks, banks' global activities allow them to maintain bank rates and demands on deposit to some extent compared to those in financial autarky. On the other hand, opening of the banking sector intensifies the impact of foreign interest rate shocks on the local bank activities. In addition to the conventional channel of international monetary transmission through interest-parity condition, global bank operation opens a new channel which makes bank rates more responsive to foreign monetary shock. Chapter 2 investigates the nature of monetary policy transmission in four small open economies - Australia, Canada, South Korea, and the U.K. - and the U.S. (the benchmark) by estimating structural vector autoregressive models using the external instrument identification method. Differing from related studies on U.S. monetary policy, which mostly employ high-frequency futures data on monetary policy operating instruments (federal fund futures rates) to identify monetary policy shocks, we propose and test alternative sets of external instruments for the four focal open economies that do not yet have well-established futures markets in monetary policy instruments. The empirical results obtained by applying this data-oriented method yield important messages from both the econometric and macroeconomic perspectives. First, U.S. monetary policy plays an important role in monetary transmission in SOEs, presumably hampering the effectiveness of domestic monetary policy. In particular, the effect of domestic monetary policy shocks on medium- and long-term interest rates is quite weak and short-lived, while U.S. monetary innovation significantly and persistently influences domestic financial variables. Second, the paper provides some evidence that foreign exchange rates in this process respond to monetary shocks as Dornbusch (1976)’s overshooting hypothesis. Chapter 3 studies the wedge between the interest rate implied by Euler equation and money market rate in five small open economies – Australia, Canada, Finland, Korea, and the U.K. Standard Euler equation predicts strongly positive relationship between the two interest rates. However, data shows significantly large wedge between them, which causes negative correlation. We explore the systemic link between the wedge and two possible influencing factors – monetary policy and net foreign asset position. The empirical results from our analysis deliver the important message that the wedge is closely related to net foreign asset position in open economies, while its relationship to the stance of monetary policy has mixed results.