Carmen Broto

Flexible Inflation Targets, Forex Interventions and Exchange Rate Volatility in Emerging Countries

Emerging economies with inflation targets (IT) face a dilemma between fulfilling the theoretical conditions of “strict IT”, which imply a fully flexible exchange rate, or applying a “flexible IT”, which entails a de facto managed-floating exchange rate with foreign exchange (forex) interventions to moderate exchange rate volatility. Using a panel data model for 37 countries we find that, although IT lead to higher exchange rate instability than alternative regimes, forex interventions in some IT countries have been more effective to lower volatility than in non-IT countries, which may justify the use of “flexible IT” by policymakers.

The Effectiveness of Forex Interventions in Four Latin American Countries

Many central banks actively intervene in the forex market, although there is no consensus on its impact on the exchange rate level and volatility. We analyze the effects of daily forex interventions in four Latin American economies with inflation targets – namely, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru – by fitting GARCH-type models. These countries represent a broad span of intervention strategies in terms of size and frequency, ranging from pure discretional to rule-based interventions. We find that only first interventions, either isolated or the initial one in a rule-based series, are able to reduce exchange rate volatility, whereas their size plays a minor role.

Inflation targeting in Latin America: Empirical analysis using GARCH models☆

During the last years, a number of countries have adopted formal inflation targeting (IT) monetary policy frameworks in a context of global inflation moderation. This paper studies inflation dynamics in eight Latin American countries, some of which have adopted formal targets. We analyze possible benefits associated with IT in terms of lower inflation, inflation volatility and volatility persistence. To describe inflation dynamics and evaluate its impact, we use an unobserved components model, where each component can follow a GARCH type process. In general, the main findings of the empirical exercise show that the adoption of IT has been useful to reduce the inflation level and volatility in these countries.

Testing for Conditional Heteroscedasticity in the Components of Inflation

In this paper we propose a model for monthly inflation with stochastic trend, seasonal and transitory components with QGARCH disturbances. This model distinguishes whether the long-run or short-run components are heteroscedastic. Furthermore, the uncertainty associated with these components may increase with the level of inflation as postulated by Friedman. We propose to use the differences between the autocorrelations of squares and the squared autocorrelations of the auxiliary residuals to identify heteroscedastic components. We show that conditional heteroscedasticity truly present in the data can be rejected when looking at the correlations of standardized residuals while the autocorrelations of auxiliary residuals have more power to detect conditional heteroscedasticity. Furthermore, the proposed statistics can help to decide which component is heteroscedastic. Their finite sample performance is compared with that of a Lagrange Multiplier test by means of Monte Carlo experiments. Finally, we use auxiliary residuals to detect conditional heteroscedasticity in monthly inflation series of eight OECD countries.

Sovereign ratings and their asymmetric response to fundamentals

Changes in sovereign ratings are strongly asymmetric, as downgrades tend to be deeper and faster than upgrades. In other words, once a country loses its initial status it takes a long time to recover it. Using S&P data, we characterise “rating cycles” in terms of their duration and amplitude. We then study whether the agency reaction to new economic and financial domestic information also differs during upgrade and downgrade phases. Our results indicate that favourable fundamentals could be helpful for smoothing and slowing down the path of downgrades, whereas favourable fundamentals do not seem to accelerate the rating recovery.

Local Debt Expansion... Vulnerability Reduction? An Assessment for Six Crises-Prone Countries

In recent years, for most emerging markets, public debt has decreased and its composition has evolved toward domestic currency. This progress is remarkable in terms of reduced financial vulnerability, which has been underpinned by favourable financing conditions and related deepening of local debt markets. In this paper, we assess the vulnerability reduction -conveyed in the ratio of total debt to GDP- achieved for six selected emerging economies, focusing on the importance of exchange rate evolution relative to the proactive policies that fiscal authorities have implemented to reduce the external exposure of debt. We first disentangle both components in the current structure of debt to show that proactive debt management has been the dominant factor in the reduction of the forex debt share. We then perform a stress test within a debt sustainability analysis framework. The results show that proactive debt management policies have -somehow paradoxically- entailed a short term cost, preventing a more dramatic reduction in the debt to GDP ratio, but this is more than compensated by the benefits in terms of financial vulnerability reduction in the face of financial turbulences, reducing simultaneously the probability of such contingency.