Michele Ca' Zorzi

On the Empirical Evidence of the Intertemporal Current Account Model for the Euro Area Countries

In this paper we present a novel approach to the empirical validation of the intertemporal approach to the current account. We develop a calibrated model highlighting the role of consumption smoothing and capital accumulation in the economic convergence process. After solving the model, we derive the theoretical values for the euro area countries’ current account, testing to what extent they match reality. The model explains most of the dispersion in the current account and saving ratio, though cannot equally well capture differences in the investment ratios. The conclusion that we draw is that consumption smoothing, based on expectations of economic convergence, is driving the current account of the euro area countries over medium-term horizons. Capital accumulation appears to play a less pronounced role. JEL Classification: D91, F36, F41

Real Exchange Rate Forecasting and PPP: This Time the Random Walk Loses

This paper brings four new insights into the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) debate. First, we show that a half-life PPP (HL) model is able to forecast real exchange rates better than the random walk (RW) model at both short and long-term horizons. Second, we find that this result holds if the speed of adjustment to the sample mean is calibrated at reasonable values rather than estimated. Third, we find that it is preferable to calibrate, rather than to elicit as a prior, the parameter determining the speed of adjustment to PPP. Fourth, for most currencies in our sample, the HL model outperforms the RW also in terms of nominal effective exchange rate forecasting.

The Minimum Economic Dividend for Joining a Currency Union

Abstract A two-country model is developed to show how the optimality of a currency union depends on whether it brings an economic dividend in terms of potential growth and the Balassa-Samuelson (BS) effect (the steady appreciation of the real exchange rate due to cross-country differences in intersectoral productivity gaps). The model shows that such dividend needs to be larger, the higher the BS effect, the smaller the size of the economy, the larger the cross-country difference in the standard deviation of the supply shocks, the smaller their correlation and the larger the standard deviation of real exchange rate shocks. We calibrate the model to quantify such dividend as a function of plausible ranges of the parameter values. The results suggest that both the BS effect and the size of real exchange rate shocks play a key role in evaluating the optimality of accessing the currency union.