Mario Cerrato

Black Market and Official Exchange Rates: Long-Run Equilibrium and Short-Run Dynamics

This paper presents further empirical evidence on the relationship between black market and official exchange rates in six emerging economies (Iran, India, Indonesia, Korea, Pakistan, and Thailand). First, it applies both time series techniques and heterogeneous panel methods to test for the existence of a long-run relationship between these two types of exchange rates. Second, it tests formally the validity of the proportionality restriction implying a constant black-market premium. Third, it also analyses the short-run dynamic responses of both markets to shocks. Finally, it tries to shed some light on the determinants of the market premium. Evidence of slow reversion to the long-run equilibrium is found. Further, it appears that capital controls and expected currency devaluation are the two main factors affecting the size of the premium and determining the breakdown in the proportionality relationship.

Panel data tests of PPP: a critical overview

This study reviews recent developments in the analysis of non-stationary panels, focusing on empirical applications of panel unit root and cointegration tests in the context of PPP. It highlights various drawbacks of existing methods. First, unit root tests suffer from severe size distortions in the presence of negative moving average errors. Second, the common demeaning procedure to correct for the bias resulting from homogeneous cross-sectional dependence is not effective; more worryingly, it introduces cross-correlation when it is not already present. Third, standard corrections for the case of heterogeneous cross-sectional dependence do not generally produce consistent estimators. Fourth, if there is between-group correlation in the innovations, the SURE estimator is affected by similar problems to FGLS methods, and does not necessarily outperform OLS. Finally, cointegration between different groups in the panel could also be a source of size distortions. Some empirical guidelines are offered to deal with these problems, but the study concludes that panel methods are unlikely to solve the PPP puzzle.

A bootstrap panel unit root test under cross-sectional dependence, with an application to PPP

A bootstrap methodology for dealing with cross-sectional dependence in panel unit root tests of real exchange rates is suggested. Monte Carlo simulations are employed to investigate the size distortion and the power of the bootstrap test-statistic. It is shown that the statistic has good power and no size distortions for moderate and large samples. The panel unit root test procedure is then applied to the long-run purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis, using a panel of 20 OECD countries over the recent float period, and the results are compared to those obtained by other tests.

Is the Consumption–Income Ratio Stationary? Evidence from Linear and Non‐Linear Panel Unit Root Tests for OECD and Non‐OECD Countries

This paper applies recently developed heterogeneous nonlinear and linear panel unit root tests that account for cross-sectional dependence to 24 OECD and 33 non-OECD countries’ consumption-income ratios over the period 1951–2003. We apply a recently developed methodology that facilitates the use of panel tests to identify which individual cross-sectional units are stationary and which are nonstationary. This extends evidence provided in the recent literature to consider both linear and nonlinear adjustment in panel unit root tests, to address the issue of cross-sectional dependence, and to substantially expand both time-series and cross sectional dimensions of the data analysed. We find that the majority (65%) of the series are nonstationary with slightly fewer OECD countries’ (61%) series exhibiting a unit root than non-OECD countries (68%).

Measuring half-lives: using a non-parametric bootstrap approach

This paper extends the Murray and Papell (2002) study by using a non-parametric bootstrap approach which allows for non-normality, and focusing on quarterly real exchange rate in twenty OECD countries in the post-1973 floating period. Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) regressions were run, and the half-lives (and confidence intervals) estimated from the corresponding impulse response functions. Further, an approximately median-unbiased estimator of the autoregressive parameters was used and the implied point estimates and confidence intervals reported. It is found that accounting for non-normality results in even higher estimates of the degree of persistence of PPP deviations, but, as in Murray and Papell (2002), the confidence intervals are so wide that no strong conclusions are warranted on the existence of a PPP puzzle.

The Purchasing Power Parity Persistence Puzzle: Evidence from Black Market Real Exchange Rates

In this paper we analyse the purchasing power parity (PPP) persistence puzzle using a unique data set of black market real exchange rates for 36 emerging market economies and (exact and approximate) median unbiased univariate and panel estimation methods. We construct bootstrap confidence intervals for the half-lives, as well as exact quantiles of the median function for different significance levels using Monte Carlo simulation. Even after accounting for a number of econometric issues, the PPP persistence puzzle is still a striking characteristic of the majority of emerging market countries. However, in a minority of exchange rates, the PPP puzzle is removed.

TESTING FOR RANDOM WALK AND STRUCTURAL BREAKS IN HEDGE FUNDS RETURNS

We investigate the presence of managerial skills in different categories of hedge funds. Our approach is more flexible that others [7, 10] since it does not make any a priori assumptions regarding the distribution of returns. We find that the Global Macro and Market Neutral funds do not follow a pure random walk. In fact, for both these models the drift parameter is statistically significant. This result rejects our initial hypothesis that hedge funds (expected-excess) returns are on average zero. Indeed, the positive intercept can be interpreted as evidence of managerial skill. We conclude that investors seeking to invest in hedge funds should consider Market Neutral funds and Global Macro funds as possible investments.

Modeling Dependence Structure and Forecasting Market Risk with Dynamic Asymmetric Copula

We study a relation between higher order comoments and dependence structure of equity portfolio in the US and UK by relying on a simple portfolio approach where equity portfolios are sorted on the higher order comoments. We find that beta and coskewness are positively related with a copula correlation, whereas cokurtosis is negatively related with it. We also find that beta positively associates with an asymmetric tail dependence whilst coskewness negatively associates with it. Furthermore, two extreme equity portfolios sorted on the higher order comments are closely correlated and their dependence structure is strongly time-varying and nonlinear. Backtesting results of value-at-risk and expected shortfall demonstrate the importance of modeling a dynamic and asymmetric dependence in the risk management.We study the asymmetric and dynamic dependence between financial assets and demonstrate, from the perspective of risk management, the economic significance of dynamic copula models. First, we construct stock and currency portfolios sorted on different characteristics (ex ante beta, coskewness, cokurtosis and order flows), and find substantial evidence of dynamic evolution between the high beta (respectively, coskewness, cokurtosis and order flow) portfolios and the low beta (coskewness, cokurtosis and order flow) portfolios. Second, using three different dependence measures, we show the presence of asymmetric dependence between these characteristic-sorted portfolios. Third, we use a dynamic copula framework based on Creal et al. (2013) and Patton (2012) to forecast the portfolio Value-at-Risk of long-short (high minus low) equity and FX portfolios. We use several widely used univariate and multivariate VaR models for the purpose of comparison. Backtesting our methodology, we find that the asymmetric dynamic copula models provide more accurate forecasts, in general, and, in particular, perform much better during the recent financial crises, indicating the economic significance of incorporating dynamic and asymmetric dependence in risk management.

An artificial neural network based heterogeneous panel unit root test in case of cross sectional independence

In this paper we propose an artificial neural network (ANN) based panel unit root test, extending [1] neural test to a dynamic heterogeneous panel context, and following the [2] panel methodology. New asymptotic results are obtained both for the individual ANN-t test statistics for unit root, and the panel unit root test statistic. An application to a panel of bilateral real exchange rate series with the US Dollar from the 20 major OECD countries is provided.

Studying the Implications of Consumption and Asset Return Data for Stochastic Discount Factors in Incomplete International Economies

We develop an incomplete markets framework to synthesize domestic and foreign stochastic discount factors (SDFs) that are consistent with limited international risk sharing. The funda- mental departure in our paper is that exchange rate growth need not equal the ratio of SDFs, and we develop a restriction that precludes “good deals” in international economies with in- complete markets. Our innovation is to study an incomplete markets problem that is consistent with SDFs that (i) are nonnegative, (ii) correctly price returns, and (iii) disallow “good deals.”