Going Multinational under Exchange Rate Uncertainty

Published as an article in: Journal of International Money and Finance, 2010, vol. 29, issue 6, pages 1171-1191.

Prices and the Real Exchange Rate in Hong Kong: 1985-2006

This paper has been presented at the XIII Encuentros de Economía Aplicada, Sevilla, Spain, 2010.

The role of the terms of trade in the trade channel of transmission of oil price shocks

This paper highlights the role of the terms of trade in the trade channel of propagation of oil price shocks both empirically and theoretically. Empirically, I show that oil price shocks have a large, persistent and statistically significant impact on the US terms of trade. Theoretically, I add oil in the model by Corsetti and Pesenti (2005) and analyse under what conditions the terms of trade plays a relevant role in the international transmission of oil price shocks. With nominal price rigidities and full exchange rate pass-through positive oil price shocks depreciate the currency of the oil importing country. The subsequent negative wealth effect adds to the recessive effect of the supply channel and may trongly reduce the consumption in the oil importing country economy. Without exchange rate pass-through oil shocks transmit to the economy only through the supply channel. The model suggests that a change in the exchange rate pass-through might contribute to explain the evidence of a weaker impact of oil price shocks on the macroeconomic activity in recent times.

Las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación en la gestión de tesorería: modelo explicativo

[ES] En el presente trabajo se analiza el uso de las TIC (Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación) en las responsabilidades de la gestión de la tesorería, tomando como referencia para su estudio las empresas de la CAPV (Comunidad Autónoma del País Vasco). Los resultados indican que las TIC más utilizadas por las empresas en operaciones financieras son el software financiero, Internet y la banca electrónica. Además, estos resultados han permitido desarrollar un modelo explicativo del uso de las TIC en las principales funciones del tesorero, como son la gestión de cobros y pagos, gestión de la liquidez, previsiones de tesorería a corto plazo, gestión de saldos bancarios en fecha valor, negociación con entidades financieras, gestión de la financiación del déficit de tesorería, gestión de la colocación de puntas de tesorería y gestión de riesgos de tipo de interés y tipo de cambio.

Autorregresive conditional volatility, skewness and kurtosis

This paper proposes a GARCH-type model allowing for time-varying volatility, skewness and kurtosis. The model is estimated assuming a Gram-Charlier series expansion of the normal density function for the error term, which is easier to estimate than the non-central t distribution proposed by Harvey and Siddique (1999). Moreover, this approach accounts for time-varying skewness and kurtosis while the approach by Harvey and Siddique (1999) only accounts for nonnormal skewness. We apply this method to daily returns of a variety of stock indices and exchange rates. Our results indicate a significant presence of conditional skewness and kurtosis. It is also found that specifications allowing for time-varying skewness and kurtosis outperform specifications with constant third and fourth moments.