Does Higher Openness Cause More Real Exchange Rate Volatility PDF Download

This work comprises five chapters that explore in detail issues related to real exchange rate volatility and trade openness. In the case of real exchange rate volatility, we start with the decomposition of this measure to determine the relative contribution of traded and nontraded goods to the variance of the real exchange rate. We obtain evidence in favour of a relevant role for non-traded goods. Our estimation of the real exchange rate volatility is included in the second chapter. Our results, based on a cross-section regression, show that the existing link of openness to real exchange rate volatility is weaker when we control for imposed and natural trade barriers. At the same time we are able to obtain a relationship between inflation volatility and the variation of the real exchange rate. Chapters three and four are related to our real exchange rate volatility model. We decide to obtain a specication for openness that could help us explore in detail the idea of country characteristics aecting trade flows. Our rst approach considers a cross-section estimation to identify the factors that consistently aect trade openness. The second approach considers a more dynamic specication. We are able to establish a link between country characteristics and trade openness. At the same time our results capture interesting changes in the eects of the dependent variables on openness across time. The final chapter takes us back to the analysis of real exchange rate volatility. In this case, we explore which measure is the most appropriate amongst those calculated from series in levels and the ones in first dierences. We conclude that series that do not show less stationary behaviour require longer time series (more observations) in order to display results that close to the reference value.