Three Essays on China's Foreign Exchange Markets

Three Essays on China's Foreign Exchange Markets
Author: Yi David Wang
Publisher: Stanford University
Total Pages: 133
Release: 2011
Genre:
ISBN:

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This dissertation is a compilation of three essays I wrote during my investigation of China's foreign exchange markets. I list the abstract of each in the following paragraphs. Essay 1: Anomaly in China's Dollar--RMB Forward Market Newly-established data on onshore deliverable US dollar--RMB forwards and the Shanghai Interbank Offered Rate from October 2006 to April 2009 reveal significant violations of covered interest rate parity. This paper hypothesizes that these violations are caused by an increase in US dollar-to-RMB conversion restrictions. Given that Chinese monetary authorities want to prevent market participants from taking advantage of the predictable appreciation of the RMB, China's State Administration of Foreign Exchange has to tighten up the control on US dollar-to-RMB conversions. Under the tightened conversion restrictions, similar deviations will resurface in the forward market whenever hot money inflow increases. One way to avoid covered interest rate parity violations in the forward market is to decrease hot money inflow into China by maintaining a stable and credible exchange rate policy. Essay 2: Convertibility Restriction in China's Foreign Exchange Market and its Impact on Forward Pricing Different from the well established markets such as the dollar-Euro market, recent CIP deviations observed in the onshore dollar-RMB forward market were primarily caused by conversion restrictions in the spot market rather than changes in credit risk and/or liquidity constraint. This paper proposes a theoretical framework under which the Chinese authorities impose conversion restrictions in the spot market in an attempt to achieve capital flow balance, but face the tradeoff between achieving such balance and disturbing current account transactions. Consequently, the level of conversion restriction should increase with the amount of capital account transactions and decrease with the amount of current account transactions. Such conversion restriction in turn places a binding constraint on forward traders' ability to cover their forward positions, resulting in the observed CIP deviation. More particularly, the model predicts that onshore forward rate is equal to a weighted average of CIP-implied forward rate and the market's expectation of future spot rate, with the weight determined by the level of conversion restriction. As a secondary result, the model also implies that offshore non-deliverable forwards reflect the market's expectation of future spot rate. Empirical results are consistent with these predictions. Essay 3: The Global Credit Crisis and China's Exchange Rate The case for stabilizing China's exchange rate against the dollar is strong. Before 2005 when the yuan/dollar rate was credibly fixed, it helped anchor China's domestic price level. But gradual RMB appreciation from July 2005 to July 2008 created a "one-way-bet" that disordered China's financial markets in two respects: (1) no private capital outflows to finance China's huge trade surplus leading to an undue build up of official exchange reserves and erosion of monetary control, and (2) a breakdown of the forward exchange market in 2007-08 so that exporters could no longer get trade credit—probably worsening the severe slump in Chinese exports. But after July 2008, the credit crunch induced an unexpected unwinding of the dollar carry trade leading to a sharp appreciation in the dollar's effective exchange rate. The People's Bank of China (PBC) then stopped RMB appreciation against the dollar. China's forward exchange market was restored and monetary control regained. Now the PBC can better support the fiscal stimulus by promoting a parallel expansion of bank credit. But, since March 2009, the fall in the dollar (with the RMB tied to it) again threatens to undermine the yuan/dollar rate and China's monetary stability.

Three Essays on China's Foreign Exchange Markets

Three Essays on China's Foreign Exchange Markets
Author: Yi David Wang
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2011
Genre:
ISBN:

Download Three Essays on China's Foreign Exchange Markets Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This dissertation is a compilation of three essays I wrote during my investigation of China's foreign exchange markets. I list the abstract of each in the following paragraphs. Essay 1: Anomaly in China's Dollar--RMB Forward Market Newly-established data on onshore deliverable US dollar--RMB forwards and the Shanghai Interbank Offered Rate from October 2006 to April 2009 reveal significant violations of covered interest rate parity. This paper hypothesizes that these violations are caused by an increase in US dollar-to-RMB conversion restrictions. Given that Chinese monetary authorities want to prevent market participants from taking advantage of the predictable appreciation of the RMB, China's State Administration of Foreign Exchange has to tighten up the control on US dollar-to-RMB conversions. Under the tightened conversion restrictions, similar deviations will resurface in the forward market whenever hot money inflow increases. One way to avoid covered interest rate parity violations in the forward market is to decrease hot money inflow into China by maintaining a stable and credible exchange rate policy. Essay 2: Convertibility Restriction in China's Foreign Exchange Market and its Impact on Forward Pricing Different from the well established markets such as the dollar-Euro market, recent CIP deviations observed in the onshore dollar-RMB forward market were primarily caused by conversion restrictions in the spot market rather than changes in credit risk and/or liquidity constraint. This paper proposes a theoretical framework under which the Chinese authorities impose conversion restrictions in the spot market in an attempt to achieve capital flow balance, but face the tradeoff between achieving such balance and disturbing current account transactions. Consequently, the level of conversion restriction should increase with the amount of capital account transactions and decrease with the amount of current account transactions. Such conversion restriction in turn places a binding constraint on forward traders' ability to cover their forward positions, resulting in the observed CIP deviation. More particularly, the model predicts that onshore forward rate is equal to a weighted average of CIP-implied forward rate and the market's expectation of future spot rate, with the weight determined by the level of conversion restriction. As a secondary result, the model also implies that offshore non-deliverable forwards reflect the market's expectation of future spot rate. Empirical results are consistent with these predictions. Essay 3: The Global Credit Crisis and China's Exchange Rate The case for stabilizing China's exchange rate against the dollar is strong. Before 2005 when the yuan/dollar rate was credibly fixed, it helped anchor China's domestic price level. But gradual RMB appreciation from July 2005 to July 2008 created a "one-way-bet" that disordered China's financial markets in two respects: (1) no private capital outflows to finance China's huge trade surplus leading to an undue build up of official exchange reserves and erosion of monetary control, and (2) a breakdown of the forward exchange market in 2007-08 so that exporters could no longer get trade credit--probably worsening the severe slump in Chinese exports. But after July 2008, the credit crunch induced an unexpected unwinding of the dollar carry trade leading to a sharp appreciation in the dollar's effective exchange rate. The People's Bank of China (PBC) then stopped RMB appreciation against the dollar. China's forward exchange market was restored and monetary control regained. Now the PBC can better support the fiscal stimulus by promoting a parallel expansion of bank credit. But, since March 2009, the fall in the dollar (with the RMB tied to it) again threatens to undermine the yuan/dollar rate and China's monetary stability.

Three Essays on Monetary Policy, the Financial Market, and Economic Growth in the U.S. and China

Three Essays on Monetary Policy, the Financial Market, and Economic Growth in the U.S. and China
Author: Juan Yang
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2010
Genre:
ISBN:

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Does monetary policy affect the real economy? If so, what is the transmission mechanism or channel through which these effects occur? These two questions are among the most important and controversial in macroeconomics. This dissertation presents some new empirical evidence that addresses each question for the U.S. and Chinese economies. Literature on monetary transmission suggests that the monetary policy can take effect on the real economy through several ways. The most noteworthy one is credit channels, including the bank lending channel and the interest channel. First, I use a new method to test for structural breaks in the U.S. monetary policy history and present some new empirical evidence to support an operative bank lending channel in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. Results show that an operative bank lending channel existed in 1955 to 1968, and its impact on the economy has become much smaller since 1981, but it still has a significant buffering effect on output by attenuating the effect of the interest channel. Second, I adopt the recently developed time series technique to explore the puzzling negative correlation between output and stock returns in China currently, and posit that it is due to a negative link between monetary policy and stock returns when monetary policy increases output. The monetary policy has not been transmitted well in the public sector which is the principal part of Chinese stock market, and increased investment capital from monetary expansion goes to real estate sector instead of the stock market. Last, I demonstrate how monetary policy has been transmitted into the public and private sectors of China through the credit channel. The fundamental identification problem inherent in using aggregated data that leads to failure in isolating demand shock from supply shock is explicitly solved by introducing control factors. I find that the monetary policy has great impact on private sector rather than public sector through credit channel in China. These findings have important practical implications for U.S. and China's economic development by improving the efficiency of the monetary policy because a comprehensive understanding of monetary transmission will lead to better policy design.

Three Essays on the Impacts of China's Monetary Policy

Three Essays on the Impacts of China's Monetary Policy
Author: Shen Chen (Ph. D.)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 62
Release: 2018
Genre: Economic development
ISBN:

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China has experienced high speed of economic growth, trying to catch up with the developed countries. Monetary policy has played a more and more important role in China. This dissertation studies the impacts of China's monetary policy on China's housing market, stock market, and China's economic growth. The first essay examines macroeconomic determinants of China's housing price by constructing a VAR model. Granger Causality tests, impulse response functions and variance decompositions are used to analyze the impacts of macroeconomic factors on the housing price. By using the monthly data from 2005 to 2015, the results show that a contractionary monetary policy will cause the growth rate of housing prices to decline in China. However, output growth doesn't play an important role in housing price in China. Besides, it will take about half a year for a contractionary monetary policy to start to influence the housing prices and the effect will last for approximate two years after the policy is initially implemented. The second essay conducts empirical analysis of the influence of economy growth and monetary policy on the stock index in China. From 2008 to 2017, China's GDP growth remained above 6% and China surpassed Japan to become the world's second largest economy in 2011. However, after the financial crisis in 2007 China's stock market remained weak and stock index fluctuated up and down at the level of 2008. Some scholars believe that the downturn of stock market in China is the result of a slowdown in China's economy. And some argue that it can be caused by the government's intervention to stock market. This paper examines the determinant of China's stock index by constructing a VAR model. The results of the empirical study show that none of the real economic variables is a cause of the stock index. And monetary policy doesn't have significant effect on the stock market in China. The third essay employs a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model with Bayesian approach to model the China economy and to analyze the impacts of monetary policy shocks. The data are on a quarterly basis and from 1992 to 2014. Based on the results of the posterior distributions and impulse response functions, I find that the monetary policy shock does have significant effects on China's output and inflation. However, based on the results of variance decomposition I find that the monetary policy shocks didn't play significant role in China's business cycle. Hence, the monetary policy might not be the major driver for China's economic growth. The reason of the ineffectiveness of China's interest rate policy might be the imperfect financial market and interest rate control in China.

Empirical Essays on China's Financial Markets

Empirical Essays on China's Financial Markets
Author: Sherena Sheng Huang
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Finance
ISBN:

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This thesis thoroughly examines productive efficiency, productivity change andliquidity risk transmission in China's financial sector. The thesis covers a major periodof development in China that witnesses processes of marketization, privatisation andfinancial liberalisation from 1993 to 2013~2014. Three investigative chapters areempirical in nature. Chapter 2 employs risk-adjusted stochastic cost and profitfrontiers to estimate bank productive efficiency, which is a broader concept ofefficiency that includes X-efficiency, economies of scale, and economies of scope. Thechapter analyses the variation of these constituents at Chinese banks by bank size andownership type. It addresses the question "does size matter" by estimating therelationship between productive efficiency constituents and bank stabilitycomponents. The chapter records an improvement in each constituent of productiveefficiency by Chinese banks between 2003 and 2013. Despite this good outcome, therelationships with bank stability are less clear-cut. Whilst the results show X-efficiencyis positively associated with bank returns on assets (ROA), the relationship betweenX-efficiency and bank profit variation is inverse. This implies that those banks thatlose less potential profit to inefficiencies hold higher levels of profit volatility, and thisoffsets the effect on ROA, which produces an inverse relationship between Xefficiencyand bank stability. The same pattern of relationships exists for economies ofscope and bank stability, whereas economies of scale place a positive effect on bankstability. A liberalised and deregulated market intensifies competition among banks.Sufficient bank capital and stabilised revenue are a prerequisite to bank stability atbanks in all sizes. Banks are exposed in risk if pursuing cost minimisation withinadequate capital and volatile returns. Increasing returns to scale show assistance toaccumulate capital and prevent profit fluctuations at Chinese banks. But can it last?Chapter three first time evidences the impact of foreign strategic investment on bankproductivity change using a risk-adjusted cost frontier. The analytical work provesthat the productivity of Chinese banks grew by 14% per annum from 1993 to 2013, andthis growth is mainly contributed by size effect. It also reveals that bank technicalchange is driven by pure technical change rather than output augmenting and nonneutraltechnical change. A natural experiment proves the positive effects of the welldefinedcooperation framework between foreign strategic investors and domesticbanks. A greater productivity growth rate presents at banks that received foreignstrategic investment after the deregulation on foreign shareholdings taking place in2003. Thus, the well-defined strategic cooperation framework between overseasinvestors and domestic banks should be more encouraged in China. The thirdinvestigative study (chapter four) employs three liquidity indicators to identifycommonality in liquidity between financial institutions and real estate firms in China.The three liquidity indicators cover the impact of market capacity, transaction costand informational efficiency on market liquidity. The study uncovers a bi-directionalloop in liquidity between financial institutions and real estate firms with theinteraction becoming stronger between banks and real estate firms and in turbulentperiods. The overheated real estate market places pressure on affordability of Chineseresidents and heightens potential credit risks for financial institutions. Strong andfrequent liquidity co-movement between the two sectors shows greater probabilitiesto incur systematic liquidity risks. Hence monitoring such liquidity interplay betweenfinancial institutions and real estate firms may prevent liquidity risk transmission inthe future.