No description available.

No description available.

Univ., Diss.--Göttingen, 2003.

Thesis advisor: Matteo Iacoviello / Since its launch, the euro has successfully achieved the status of an international currency, and the prospect of its ability to challenge the dollar is increasingly credible. This paper supplements the ongoing academic discussion by reevaluating the characteristics necessary for such a position in light of the most recent information available on the euro area, and then providing econometric evidence as support. I regress the lags of shares of dollar and euro reserves on the current shares and predict steady state values for each currency. I then regress the same lags, as well as the exchange rate lag, on the change in the euro/dollar exchange rate. I find, first, that the share of euro reserves, while still not as high as the share of dollars, is nonetheless significant: about 26%. Second, the euro/dollar exchange rate is only slightly affected by changes in the share of either currency's reserves. I conclude that confidence in the euro as an alternative international currency is growing, and that the euro has become a real challenge to the dollar. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2007. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

No description available.

No description available.

Whether or not currency markets may be regarded as efficient or not has been a hotly debated issue in the academic literature over recent decades. Economic theory would suggest that these markets should be efficient because they are apparently good examples of a perfectly competitive market structure. On the other hand, empirical tests of the efficient market hypothesis within these currency markets unequivocally find them to be inefficient. There is still no good explanation for this conundrum and as a result a fair amount of effort is still expended on refining the empirical studies of market efficiency, a task which is taken up in the four empirical studies that comprise this thesis. Within efficient markets, prices are predicted to respond &quotquickly" with the arrival of new information and the empirical work in the thesis focuses on these issues by identifying three key areas for research, namely, price adjustment and volatility, volatility and the &quotnews", and the speed of price adjustment. In essence, the studies examine whether there is inefficient adjustment to news in terms of excessive volatility, whether or not news is actually the main driver of exchange rate volatility and whether or not &quotquickly" can be measured empirically. The empirical results reported within this thesis confirm that the Australian dollar has not been an excessively volatile currency, even though the level of volatility has been increasing; that the pattern of information flow explains a significant degree of the non constant variance in the returns of the world's most actively traded currencies, (i.e. information explains price innovation); that the reaction time to macroeconomic news occurs within seconds of a pre-scheduled announcement, and that the bulk of adjustment to fundamental value occurs within the hour. These findings are consistent with what would be expected within an efficient market. The results reported within this thesis therefore suggest that the currency markets studied are efficient, at least for the sample periods of the data used in the studies. Exchange rates adjust rapidly with information arrival albeit not completely. It is also the case that a number of additional research questions emerge from this research. For example we know that volatility is not excessive and that it is increasing. What we do not know is the point at which increasing volatility becomes excessive. We know that exchange rates react quickly with the arrival of macroeconomic news, but we do not know precisely how long it takes for volatility to return to preannouncement levels, or why the reaction to news is inconsistent. We also do not know what type of information best explains volatility above that which is explained by the systematic dissemination of information or why full adjustment to fundamental value does not occur? Answers to these questions provide a future research agenda. Answers may provide insight that will help financial economists explain the apparent failure of the speculative efficient hypothesis.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 2003. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 238-242) and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Cornell University, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.