Raphael Auer

What Drives TARGET2 Balances? Evidence from a Panel Analysis

What are the drivers of the large Target2 (T2) balances that have emerged in the European Monetary Union since the start of the financial crisis in 2007? This paper examines the extent to which the evolution of national T2 balances can be statistically associated with cross-border private capital flows and current account (CA) balances. In a quarterly panel spanning the years 1999 to 2012 and twelve countries, it is shown that while the CA and the evolution of T2 balances were unrelated until the start of the 2007 financial crisis, since then, the relation between these two variables has become statistically significant and economically sizeable. This reflects the “sudden stop” to private sector capital that funded CA imbalances beforehand. I next examine how different types of private capital flows have evolved over the last years and how this can be related to the evolution of T2 balances, finding some deposit flight by private customers, a substantial retrenchment of cross-border interbank lending, and also an increase of bank’s holdings of high-quality sovereign debt. My first conclusion from this analysis is that since T2 imbalances were caused by a sudden stop and are unlikely to grow without bounds since Euro area CA imbalances are currently diminishing at a rapid pace, there is no evidence that the institutional setup of the European Monetary Union needs to be reformed fundamentally. My second conclusion relates to how the current system transfers risks across the currency union, both in terms of risk transfer from T2 debtor to T2 creditor nations and in terms of risk transfer from the private sector to the public sector within T2 creditor nations. I evaluate existing reform proposals in the light of these risk transfers.

CHF strength and Swiss export performance -- evidence and outlook from a disaggregate analysis

Why has Swiss export performance been so strong during the past quarters despite the marked appreciation of the Swiss Franc (CHF)? What is the outlook for Swiss exports given the still elevated CHF? In this article, we shed light on these questions by analysing a panel of Swiss exports disaggregated along both the regional and the industry dimension. To explain the export performance of the recent past, we estimate how the exchange rate and demand growth in each export market affect trade flows and also, how this varies across different industries. The appreciation of the CHF has considerably dampened Swiss export performance. As a counterfactual, we ask how Swiss exports would have developed had the CHF stayed flat against other currencies during the 5 years leading up to October 2010. Compared to this scenario, the Swiss export industry has already lost a cumulative of CHF 35 billion in revenues due to the CHF appreciation. At the current juncture, monthly exports are reduced by CHF 2.7 billion (around 17%). We show that the key reason for the strong export performance despite the CHF strength was the rebound in global demand in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Moreover, we also document that the timing of global demand growth has completely masked the effect of the CHF strength: during the last quarters, periods of pronounced CHF appreciation always coincided with strong recovery of global demand. Failure to account for this coincidence could lead to the wrong assumption that the exchange rate matters very little for Swiss export performance. Last, to gauge the likely evolution of Swiss exports and their regional composition in the years to come, we combine our estimation results with the regional Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and exchange rate forecasts provided by the Swiss National Bank (SNB). Following this approach, we predict that over the next 3 years, Swiss exports will rise a combined 16%, with little less than half of this increase going to Emerging Asia and 30% to the euro zone. We also document the key industries that will drive Swiss export growth in the near future.

The Globalisation of Inflation: The Growing Importance of Global Value Chains

Greater international economic interconnectedness over recent decades has been changing inflation dynamics. This paper presents evidence that the expansion of global value chains (GVCs), ie cross-border trade in intermediate goods and services, is an important channel through which global economic slack influences domestic inflation. In particular, we document the extent to which the growth in GVCs explains the established empirical correlation between global economic slack and national inflation rates, both across countries and over time. Accounting for the role of GVCs, we also find that the conventional trade-based measures of openness used in previous studies are poor proxies for this transmission channel. The results support the hypothesis that as GVCs expand, direct and indirect competition among economies increases, making domestic inflation more sensitive to the global output gap. This can affect the trade-offs that central banks face when managing inflation.

Dynamic Entry in Vertically Differentiated Markets

We develop a model of vertical innovation in which firms incur a market entry cost and choose a unique level of quality. Once established, firms compete for market shares, selling to consumers with heterogeneous tastes for quality. The equilibrium of the pricing game exists and is unique within our setup. Exogenous productivity growth induces firms to enter the market sequentially at the top end of the quality spectrum. A central feature of the model is that optimization problems of consecutive entrants are self-similar so that new firms enter in constant time-intervals and choose qualities that are a constant fraction higher than incumbent qualities. The asymmetries of quality choice, which inevitably arise because the quality spectrum has top and a bottom, is thus overcome by sequential entry. Our main contribution lies in handling these asymmetries.