Essays on Financial Integration, Financial Market Dependence, and Monetary Policy Transmission PDF Download

Author: Jongrim Ha
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Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
This dissertation offers three essays addressing critical topics in financial market dependence and monetary policy transmission in an era of financial integration: 1) the domestic effects of monetary policy (MP) shocks on market interest rates in small open economies, 2) international transmission of U.S. MP shocks to other open financial markets, and 3) volatility spillovers among financial markets in emerging market (EM) economies. The first chapter investigates the nature of monetary policy transmission in selected small open economies and the U.S. by estimating structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models using the external instrument identification method. Differing from related studies on U.S. monetary policy, which mostly employ high-frequency futures rates to identify monetary policy shocks, the study proposes and tests alternative sets of external instruments for the focal open economies that do not yet have well-established futures markets in MP instruments. The second chapter focuses on the international transmission of U.S. monetary shocks into a variety of financial markets in open economies. I again exploit the external instrument approach to identify the impact of U.S. and domestic MP shocks in a SVAR system. Utilizing the identified shocks for the event study analysis and the local projection estimation, I further test non-linear features of such transmission. Empirical results from the first and second chapters provide a variety of meaningful insights. The results show that foreign exchange rates respond to monetary shocks flexibly, i.e., without generating puzzles raised by earlier studies and that the shocks strongly propagate into other types of open financial markets as well. The studies also confirm the significant transmission of domestic monetary shocks in open economies, but U.S. shocks appear to exhibit greater and more persistent influences over domestic asset prices than domestic shocks. Besides, the international propagation of U.S. shocks also demonstrate non-linear features. The third chapter investigates the occurrence of dependency between foreign exchange markets and stock markets in EM countries by testing volatility spillovers of asset returns. I modify the classical BEKK GARCH (1,1) model to study the dynamics and origins of volatility spillovers. The empirical results are threefold. First, volatility spillovers between financial markets are significant in most EM countries. Second, such spillovers are found to be contingent on the sample period and market conditions, a result that is generally consistent with findings in the literature on time-varying, asymmetric, and contagion-shift spillovers. Finally, the results suggest that, under normal conditions, the relevant spillovers are explained mostly by comovement from common information about fundamentals; during crises, however, while common information plays a role, market contagion also becomes an important source of spillovers.