Remzi Uctum

Public Debt, the Unit Root Hypothesis and Structural Breaks: A Multi-Country Analysis

We assess fiscal performances in G7 and selected Latin American and Asian countries. We consider two questions: (i) Have public finances been sustainable? (ii) Do countries follow more restrictive fiscal policies when debt starts to rise? We find that: (i) the traditional unit root tests often overlook the corrective actions taken by many governments; controlling for structural breaks changes the non-stationarity results dramatically among the three groups; (ii) estimation of a reaction function for governments, expanded by incorporating structural breaks, provides further evidence for significant active anti-debt policies among G7 countries, and to a lesser extent in the other regions.

Switching between Expectation Processes in the Foreign Exchange Market: A Probabilistic Approach Using Survey Data

This paper relaxes a fundamental hypothesis commonly accepted in the expectation formation literature: expectations are, unchangingly, either rational or generated by one of the three simple extrapolative, regressive or adaptive processes. Using expectations survey data provided by Consensus Forecasts on six European exchange rates against the US Dollar, we find that the rational expectations hypothesis is rejected at the aggregate level. By implementing a switching regression methodology with stochastic choice of regime, we show that the expectation generating process is given at any time by some combination of the three simple processes. An interpretation of this framework in terms of economically rational expectations is suggested.

Expectation formation in the foreign exchange market: a time-varying heterogeneity approach using survey data

Using Consensus Economics survey data on JPY/USD and GBP/USD exchange rate expectations for the 3- and 12-month horizons over the period November 1989–December 2012, we first show that expectations fail the conventional tests of unbiasedness and do not exhibit a learning process towards rationality. Our approach is consistent with the economically rational expectations theory (Feige and Pearce, 1976), which states that information costs and agents’ aversion to misestimating future exchange rates determine the optimal amounts of information on which they base their expectations. The time variability of the cost/aversion ratios justifies at the aggregate level a representation of expectations as a linear combination of the traditional extrapolative, adaptive and regressive processes augmented by a forward market component, whose parameters are allowed to change over time. This mixed expectation model with unstable heterogeneity is validated by our Kalman filter estimation results for the two currencies and the two horizons considered. Although the relative importance of the ‘fundamentalists’ (‘chartists’) is found to increase (decrease) with the time-horizon, chartist behaviour appears to dominate fundamentalist behaviour for both horizons. Central bank intervention is then effective in stabilizing the foreign exchange markets if it encourages fundamentalist activity.

Do markets learn to rationally expect US interest rates? An anchoring approach

ABSTRACT We propose an augmented and dynamic forecast anchoring model to examine whether a group of rational forecasters coexists with or emerges besides a group of forecasters employing heuristic rules. This model is consistent with the economically rational expectations theory. Using experts’ 3-month and 10-year Treasury bill rate survey expectations at short and long horizons, we find that aggregate expectations fail to exhibit a learning process towards rationality. While forecasters essentially anchor their judgements to heuristics, a small proportion of agents rationally forecast the short-term interest rate, possibly due to Federal Reserve’s transparency practice in the conduct of monetary policy and forward guidance at the zero lower bound.