[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/7577.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Potential Pitfalls for the Purchasing-Power-Parity Puzzle? Sampling and Specification Biases in Mean-Reversion Tests of the Law of One Price

Author

Listed:
  • Alan M. Taylor
Abstract
The PPP puzzle is based on empirical evidence that international price differences for individual goods (LOOP) or baskets of goods (PPP) appear highly persistent or even non-stationary. The present consensus is these price differences have a half-life that is of the order of five years at best, and infinity at worst. This seems unreasonable in a world where transportation and transaction costs appear so low as to encourage arbitrage and the convergence of price gaps over much shorter horizons, typically days or weeks. However, current empirics rely on a particular choice of methodology, involving (i) relatively low-frequency monthly, quarterly, or annual data, and (ii) a linear model specification. In fact, these methodological choices are not innocent, and they can be shown to bias analysis to-wards findings of slow convergence and a random walk. Intuitively, if we suspect that the actual adjustment horizon is of the order of days then monthly and annual data cannot be expected to reveal it. If we suspect arbitrage costs are high enough to produce a substantial band of inaction' then a linear model will fail to support convergence if the process spends considerable time random-walking in that band. Thus, when testing for PPP or LOOP, model specification and data sampling should not proceed without consideration of the actual institutional context and logistical framework of markets.

Suggested Citation

  • Alan M. Taylor, 2000. "Potential Pitfalls for the Purchasing-Power-Parity Puzzle? Sampling and Specification Biases in Mean-Reversion Tests of the Law of One Price," NBER Working Papers 7577, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7577
    Note: DAE IFM ITI
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w7577.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Balke, Nathan S & Fomby, Thomas B, 1997. "Threshold Cointegration," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 38(3), pages 627-645, August.
    2. Kenneth Rogoff, 1996. "The Purchasing Power Parity Puzzle," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 34(2), pages 647-668, June.
    3. Bayoumi, Tamim A, 1993. "Financial Deregulation and Consumption in the United Kingdom," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 75(3), pages 536-539, August.
    4. Taylor, Mark P & Peel, David A & Sarno, Lucio, 2001. "Nonlinear Mean-Reversion in Real Exchange Rates: Toward a Solution to the Purchasing Power Parity Puzzles," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 42(4), pages 1015-1042, November.
    5. Christiano, Lawrence J & Eichenbaum, Martin & Marshall, David, 1991. "The Permanent Income Hypothesis Revisited," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 59(2), pages 397-423, March.
    6. Lothian, James R., 1997. "Multi-country evidence on the behavior of purchasing power parity under the current float," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 19-35, February.
    7. Menzie Chinn & Louis Johnston, 1996. "Real Exchange Rate Levels, Productivity and Demand Shocks: Evidence from a Panel of 14 Countries," NBER Working Papers 5709, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Canzoneri, Matthew B. & Cumby, Robert E. & Diba, Behzad, 1999. "Relative labor productivity and the real exchange rate in the long run: evidence for a panel of OECD countries," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(2), pages 245-266, April.
    9. Courtland L. Washburn & Clark S. Binkley, 1990. "On the Use of Period-Average Stumpage Prices to Estimate Forest Asset Pricing Models," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 66(4), pages 379-393.
    10. Glen, Jack D., 1992. "Real exchange rates in the short, medium, and long run," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(1-2), pages 147-166, August.
    11. Obstfeld, Maurice & Taylor, Alan M., 1997. "Nonlinear Aspects of Goods-Market Arbitrage and Adjustment: Heckscher's Commodity Points Revisited," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 11(4), pages 441-479, December.
    12. Hall, Robert E, 1988. "Intertemporal Substitution in Consumption," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 96(2), pages 339-357, April.
    13. Jorion, Philippe & Sweeney, Richard J., 1996. "Mean reversion in real exchange rates: evidence and implications for forecasting," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 15(4), pages 535-550, August.
    14. Blundell-Wignall, Adrian & Browne, Frank & Tarditi, Alison, 1995. "Financial Liberalization and the Permanent Income Hypothesis," The Manchester School of Economic & Social Studies, University of Manchester, vol. 63(2), pages 125-144, June.
    15. Sarno,Lucio & Taylor,Mark P., 2003. "The Economics of Exchange Rates," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521485845, January.
    16. Engel, Charles, 2000. "Long-run PPP may not hold after all," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 51(2), pages 243-273, August.
    17. Ramey, Valerie A, 1989. "Inventories as Factors of Production and Economic Fluctuations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(3), pages 338-354, June.
    18. Robert E. Hall, 1987. "Consumption," NBER Working Papers 2265, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. Apte, Prakash & Kane, Marian & Sercu, Piet, 1994. "Relative PPP in the medium run," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 13(5), pages 602-622, October.
    20. Michael, Panos & Nobay, A Robert & Peel, David A, 1997. "Transactions Costs and Nonlinear Adjustment in Real Exchange Rates: An Empirical Investigation," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 105(4), pages 862-879, August.
    21. Sarno, Lucio & Taylor, Mark P., 1998. "Real Interest Rates, Liquidity Constraints and Financial Deregulation: Private Consumption Behavior in the U.K," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 20(2), pages 221-242, April.
    22. Berloffa, Gabriella, 1997. "Temporary and Permanent Changes in Consumption Growth," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 107(441), pages 345-358, March.
    23. Andrew W. Lo, A. Craig MacKinlay, 1988. "Stock Market Prices do not Follow Random Walks: Evidence from a Simple Specification Test," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 1(1), pages 41-66.
    24. Lothian, James R. & Taylor, Mark P., 1997. "Real exchange rate behavior," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 16(6), pages 945-954, December.
    25. Frankel, Jeffrey A. & Rose, Andrew K., 1996. "A panel project on purchasing power parity: Mean reversion within and between countries," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(1-2), pages 209-224, February.
    26. Bacchetta, Philippe & Gerlach, Stefan, 1997. "Consumption and credit constraints: International evidence," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(2), pages 207-238, October.
    27. Poterba, James M. & Summers, Lawrence H., 1988. "Mean reversion in stock prices : Evidence and Implications," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 27-59, October.
    28. Alan M. Taylor, 1996. "International Capital Mobility in History: Purchasing-Power Parity in the Long Run," NBER Working Papers 5742, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    29. Shiller, Robert J. & Perron, Pierre, 1985. "Testing the random walk hypothesis : Power versus frequency of observation," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 18(4), pages 381-386.
    30. Wu, Yangru, 1996. "Are Real Exchange Rates Nonstationary? Evidence from a Panel-Data Test," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 28(1), pages 54-63, February.
    31. Ermini, Luigi, 1993. "Effects of Transitory Consumption and Temporal Aggregation on the Permanent Income Hypothesis," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 75(4), pages 736-740, November.
    32. Papell, David H., 1997. "Searching for stationarity: Purchasing power parity under the current float," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(3-4), pages 313-332, November.
    33. Cochrane, John H, 1988. "How Big Is the Random Walk in GNP?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 96(5), pages 893-920, October.
    34. Ng, Serena, 1995. "Testing for unit roots in flow data sampled at different frequencies," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 47(3-4), pages 237-242, March.
    35. Francisco Maeso-Fernandez, 1998. "Econometric methods and purchasing power parity: short- and long-run PPP," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 30(11), pages 1443-1457.
    36. Froot, Kenneth A. & Rogoff, Kenneth, 1995. "Perspectives on PPP and long-run real exchange rates," Handbook of International Economics, in: G. M. Grossman & K. Rogoff (ed.), Handbook of International Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 32, pages 1647-1688, Elsevier.
    37. Campbell, John Y & Mankiw, N Gregory, 1990. "Permanent Income, Current Income, and Consumption," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 8(3), pages 265-279, July.
    38. Schwert, G. William, 1987. "Effects of model specification on tests for unit roots in macroeconomic data," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 20(1), pages 73-103, July.
    39. Sercu, Piet & Uppal, Raman & Van Hulle, Cynthia, 1995. "The Exchange Rate in the Presence of Transaction Costs: Implications for Tests of Purchasing Power Parity," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 50(4), pages 1309-1319, September.
    40. Lothian, James R & Taylor, Mark P, 1996. "Real Exchange Rate Behavior: The Recent Float from the Perspective of the Past Two Centuries," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 104(3), pages 488-509, June.
    41. Richard T. Baillie & Tim Bollerslev, 1991. "Intra-Day and Inter-Market Volatility in Foreign Exchange Rates," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 58(3), pages 565-585.
    42. Lam, K, 1990. "Working's effect revisited--Fitting univariate time series to stock price data," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 18(3), pages 337-338.
    43. Dumas, Bernard, 1992. "Dynamic Equilibrium and the Real Exchange Rate in a Spatially Separated World," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 5(2), pages 153-180.
    44. O'Connell, Paul G. J., 1998. "The overvaluation of purchasing power parity," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 44(1), pages 1-19, February.
    45. Oh, Keun-Yeob, 1996. "Purchasing power parity and unit root tests using panel data," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 15(3), pages 405-418, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Obstfeld, Maurice & Taylor, Alan M., 1997. "Nonlinear Aspects of Goods-Market Arbitrage and Adjustment: Heckscher's Commodity Points Revisited," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 11(4), pages 441-479, December.
    2. Alan M. Taylor & Mark P. Taylor, 2004. "The Purchasing Power Parity Debate," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 18(4), pages 135-158, Fall.
    3. Philip Hans Franses & Dick van Dijk, 2006. "A simple test for PPP among traded goods," Applied Financial Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 16(1-2), pages 19-27.
    4. Jean Imbs & Haroon Mumtaz & Morten O. Ravn & Hélène Rey, 2005. "PPP Strikes Back: Aggregation And the Real Exchange Rate," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 120(1), pages 1-43.
    5. repec:onb:oenbwp:y::i:28:b:1 is not listed on IDEAS
    6. Georgios Chortareas & George Kapetanios, 2004. "The Yen Real Exchange Rate may be Stationary after all: Evidence from Non‐linear Unit‐root Tests," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 66(1), pages 113-131, February.
    7. Brissimis, Sophocles N. & Sideris, Dimitris A. & Voumvaki, Fragiska K., 2005. "Testing long-run purchasing power parity under exchange rate targeting," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 24(6), pages 959-981, October.
    8. Lucio Sarno & Mark P. Taylor, 2002. "Purchasing Power Parity and the Real Exchange Rate," IMF Staff Papers, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 49(1), pages 1-5.
    9. Baum, Christopher F. & Barkoulas, John T. & Caglayan, Mustafa, 2001. "Nonlinear adjustment to purchasing power parity in the post-Bretton Woods era," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 20(3), pages 379-399, June.
    10. Taylor, Mark P & Peel, David A & Sarno, Lucio, 2001. "Nonlinear Mean-Reversion in Real Exchange Rates: Toward a Solution to the Purchasing Power Parity Puzzles," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 42(4), pages 1015-1042, November.
    11. Juvenal Luciana & Taylor Mark P., 2008. "Threshold Adjustment of Deviations from the Law of One Price," Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics & Econometrics, De Gruyter, vol. 12(3), pages 1-46, September.
    12. Kul B. Luintel, 2000. "Real exchange rate behaviour: evidence from black markets," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 15(2), pages 161-185.
    13. Miguel Carvalho & Paulo Júlio, 2012. "Digging out the PPP hypothesis: an integrated empirical coverage," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 42(3), pages 713-744, June.
    14. O'Connell, P. G. J., 1998. "Market frictions and real exchange rates1," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 17(1), pages 71-95, February.
    15. Lucio Sarno, 2000. "Systematic sampling and real exchange rates," Review of World Economics (Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv), Springer;Institut für Weltwirtschaft (Kiel Institute for the World Economy), vol. 136(1), pages 24-57, March.
    16. Papell, David H. & Theodoridis, Hristos, 1998. "Increasing evidence of purchasing power parity over the current float," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 17(1), pages 41-50, February.
    17. Georg H. Strasser, 2010. "The Efficiency of the Global Markets for Final Goods and Productive Capabilities," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 766, Boston College Department of Economics, revised 31 Jan 2012.
    18. Papell, David H., 2002. "The great appreciation, the great depreciation, and the purchasing power parity hypothesis," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 57(1), pages 51-82, June.
    19. Taylor, Mark P. & Sarno, Lucio, 1998. "The behavior of real exchange rates during the post-Bretton Woods period," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(2), pages 281-312, December.
    20. Fleissig, Adrian R. & Strauss, Jack, 2000. "Panel unit root tests of purchasing power parity for price indices," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 489-506, August.
    21. Hwa-Taek Lee & Gawon Yoon, 2013. "Does purchasing power parity hold sometimes? Regime switching in real exchange rates," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 45(16), pages 2279-2294, June.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C22 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Time-Series Models; Dynamic Quantile Regressions; Dynamic Treatment Effect Models; Diffusion Processes
    • C51 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Model Construction and Estimation

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7577. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.