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Selective Attention in Exchange Rate Forecasting
Kapounek, S. ; Kučerová, Z. ; Kočenda, Evžen
We analyze the exchange rate forecasting performance under the assumption of selective attention. Although currency markets react to a variety of different information, we hypothesize that market participants process only a limited amount of information. Our analysis includes more than 100,000 news articles relevant to the six most-traded foreign exchange currency pairs for the period of 1979–2016. We employ a dynamic model averaging approach to reduce model selection uncertainty and to identify time-varying probability to include regressors in our models. Our results show that smaller sizes models accounting for the presence of selective attention offer improved fitting and forecasting results. Specifically, we document a growing impact of foreign trade and monetary policy news on the euro/dollar exchange rate following the global financial crisis. Overall, our results point to the existence of selective attention in the case of most currency pairs.
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The Impact of Financial Variables on Czech Macroeconomic Developments: An Empirical Investigation
Adam, Tomáš ; Plašil, Miroslav
This paper investigates empirically to what extent financial variables can explain macroeconomic developments in the Czech Republic and how the results are sensitive to some (usually reasonable or routinely made) modeling choices. To this end, the dynamic model averaging/selection framework is applied to a universe of (potentially large) time-varying parameter VAR models, which allows one to assess the explanatory power of financial variables at each point in time. Based on a set of 27 competing models and an extensive ensemble of alternative specifications of those models, we find that financial variables were particularly relevant in explaining developments in the lead-up to and during economic downturns. By contrast, in tranquil times, models containing only traditional macroeconomic variables explained macroeconomic dynamics reasonably well. Within the broad set of financial variables considered, credit to the private sector, bank profitability, and leverage seem to be among the most relevant indicators.
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Inflation and the Steeplechase Between Economic Activity Variables
Baxa, Jaromír ; Plašil, M. ; Vašíček, B.
A sharp increase in unemployment accompanied by a relatively muted response of inflation during the Great Recession added further doubts to the validity of the Phillips curve and the existence of a systemic relationship between economic activity and inflation. This paper aims to show to what extent the uncertainty about the choice of proper forcing variable contributes to the ambiguity of the evidence on the Phillips curve in the United States and other G7 countries. We use dynamic model averaging (Raftery et al., 2010), which marries the flexibility of the time-varying parameter framework with the possibility of model switching in each period. Our results show that inflation seems to respond to different measures of economic activity across time and space to a varying extent and no measure of economic activity clearly dominates in all countries or over the whole sample.
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Inflation and the Steeplechase Between Economic Activity Variables
Baxa, Jaromír ; Plašil, Miroslav ; Vašíček, Bořek
A sharp increase in unemployment accompanied by a relatively muted response of inflation during the Great Recession cast further doubts on the validity of the Phillips curve. With the aid of dynamic model averaging (Raftery et al., 2010), this paper aims to highlight that the existence of a systemic relation between real activity and inflation is blurred due to (i) the failure to capture inflationary pressures by means of a single measure of economic activity, and (ii) the existence of a non-linear response of inflation to the driving variable. Based on data for the U.S. and other G7 countries, our results show that the relation between economic activity and inflation is quite sturdy when one allows for more complex assessment of the former. We find that inflation responds to different measures of economic activity across time and space, and no measure of economic activity clearly dominates. The output gap is often outperformed by unemployment-related variables such as the short-term unemployment rate, the unemployment expansion gap, and the unemployment recession gap. Finally, our results confirm a weakening of the inflation–activity relationship (i.e., a flattening of the Phillips curve) in the last decades, which might be attributed to structural changes in the economy and monetary policy, that is robust both across activity measures and across countries.
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