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- Byusa, Vincent
(författare)
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Money demand, real effective exchange rates, and uncertainty
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This PhD thesis consists of three distinct but interrelated research papers that collectively explore critical aspects of money demand, real effective exchange rates behavior, and uncertainty in different contexts. The first paper examines the nature of money demand in Rwanda and the rationale for the country’s monetary policy shift to inflation targeting in 2019, providing evidence of long-run money demand stability despite uncertainties affecting the global economy, and challenging the view that monetary aggregates should have no role in Rwanda’s monetary policy. The second paper investigates the complex effects of grant revenues on real effective exchange rates in Sub-Saharan African countries, revealing the outcomes of short-run depreciation and long-run appreciation. The last paper assesses how exchange rate regime choice affects the degree and persistence of real effective exchange rate misalignments, showing that, relative to a floating exchange rate regime, fixed and intermediate regimes effectively limit misalignment size, although with higher persistence. Together, these papers offer nuanced insights into the interaction between the money market, uncertainty, external grants, and exchange rate regime, underscoring the need for careful policy consideration to ensure economic stability and competitive currency values.
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| 2. |
- Habibi, Arash
(författare)
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International trade, global value chains and sustainable development
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three articles that explore the challenges of international trade, focusing on environmental (article 1), social (article 2), and macroeconomic considerations (article 3). Articles 1 and 3 delve deeper into the complexities of international trade due to globalization. Articles 1 and 2 address how international trade interacts with crucial aspects of sustainable development, namely carbon pricing and gender equality. Overall the thesis dives into sectoral heterogenities and highlights the need for policies that consider sectoral aspects due to the distinct characteristics of each sector.The first article examines the impact of carbon pricing on carbon leakage which is a counteractive mechanism for the effectiveness of carbon pricing. The study confirms that fuel excise taxes, rather than carbon taxes or emission trading schemes, are the primary drivers of carbon leakage. Structural gravity estimates show that carbon pricing based on carbon taxes and emission trading schemes (ETS) does not cause carbon leakage, but fuel excise taxes and ETS exemptions have a significant impact. This finding is supported when looking at carbon prices in different sectors. Thus, policymakers should consider adjusting fuel excise taxes accordingly.The second article delves into the effectiveness of anti-discrimination references in trade agreements on promoting gender equality in developing countries. The research demonstrates that the location and language of these references significantly influence their impact. The results indicate that such references are more likely to improve gender-related labor conditions when they appear in legally binding sections and are associated with hard modal verbs like “shall” or “should”, in contrast to those that appear in aspirational sections and are associated with softer modal verbs like “may” or “might”. Furthermore, the results highlight a significant effect of these references in the agriculture sector, which hosts most of the female labor force in developing countries.Finally, the third article investigates the non-linear relationship between exchange rates and industrial production in various sectors of the U.S. economy. Employing a non-linear autoregressive distributed lags model, the research reveals short-run and long-run non-linear effects of exchange rate fluctuations on the production of non-energy materials, durable manufacturing, consumer goods, and business equipment. These findings underscore the role of import contents of exports on sectoral production.
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| 3. |
- Umulisa, Yvonne
(författare)
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The prospects for the East African Monetary Union : An empirical analysis
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis operationalizes the theory of optimum currency areas, which describes the preconditions (criteria) that countries must fulfill prior to forming a monetary union. In light of the different dimensions of the theory that are examined, the empirical findings from the four papers in this thesis seem to favor forming a monetary union among East African Community (EAC) partner states. Hence, the findings are important for EAC policymakers, as they decided to participate in a monetary union by 2024.The first paper uses a gravity model to determine to what extent membership in the EAC has affected intraregional trade. One common argument is that if there is not much trade between EAC member countries, there is no interest in forming a monetary union. The paper implements the fixed effect filter estimator, which uses a two-step approach and has better performance than the standard fixed effect estimator. The empirical findings in this paper show that EAC membership has a positive and significant effect on intra-trade among member countries. The second paper investigates business cycle synchronization and core-periphery patterns. Greater synchronization is needed for an easy transition towards monetary union. Unlike previous studies, this paper uses wavelet decomposition, a powerful tool for analyzing the comovement of business cycles. It is found that business cycle synchronization is more significant for Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, the countries that also form the core of the East African Monetary Union.The link between business cycle synchronization and trade intensity among EAC countries is established in the third paper. This analysis is relevant, as it is associated with the hypothesis of the endogeneity of the optimum currency area criteria, whereby a monetary union among member countries is predicted to increase trade among them, which, in turn, may lead to more synchronized business cycles. The empirical findings show that trade intensity among the considered countries has indeed led to more synchronized business cycles, suggesting that monetary union among EAC countries may be beneficial.Moreover, the fourth and last paper uses a similarity index and a rank correlation measure, Kendall’s tau, to investigate the movement of inflation rates among EAC countries. The results show that changes in inflation have become more similar over time and that there are high correlations between EAC countries. This paper also investigates the convergence in inflation rate levels among the EAC countries. It is found that these levels have tendency to converge. These findings favor the formation of a monetary union among these countries.
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