Dynamics of macroeconomic and financial variables in different time horizons

Abstract: This dissertation consists of an introductory chapter and four papers dealing with financial issues of open economies, which can be in two broad categorizations: 1) exchange rate movements and 2) stock market interdependence. The first paper covers how the exchange rate changes affect the prices of internationally traded goods. With the variables (the price of exports in exporters’ currency and the exchange rate, both of which are in logarithmic form) being cointegrated, a model with both long- and short-run characteristics (the Error Correction Model, ECM) is formulated. By using prices of major exports from South Korea to different destinations over the world, how the markup adjustment of those exports varies with respect to changes in exchange rates is estimated empirically under the context of pricing-to-market (PTM).The second paper relates to the standard macroeconomic models of exchange rate determination. This paper investigates the relationship between the exchange rate and the domestic-foreign interest rate differential. The associated regression model follows the form of earlier literature in testing the effect of the interest rate differential on the exchange rate although the use of wavelet-decomposed levels of the data series distinguishes this paper from the earlier empirical works.A relevant issue associated with the relationship between export prices and exchange rates for different industries is found in the third paper. The responsiveness of firms’ profitability to changes in exchange rates (i.e. exchange rate exposure) is tested using a factor model. Following specifications of the earlier literature on this subject, returns of various industries (or sectors) of the US stock market are regressed on the changes in exchange rates as well as the excess return on the market portfolio. The Kalman filter is used to estimate time-varying coefficients (beta) of the variables at different frequencies (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually).After the three papers noted above, the dissertation moves on to the final paper which explores the relationship between national stock markets (i.e. interdependence). The causal linkages of the U.S. stock market to each of six eastern Asian national stock markets (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) as well as the causal linkages among those Asian equity markets are tested in a vector autoregression (VAR) model using wavelet-decomposed data.