Date of Award

12-2020

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Economics

First Advisor

Dr. Susan Pozo

Second Advisor

Dr. Mark Wheeler

Third Advisor

Dr. Menelik Geremew

Keywords

Safe haven, the U.S. dollar, market uncertainty, the euro, the VIX, monetary policy

Abstract

This dissertation develops three essays on safe haven currency behavior and international monetary interactions.

Essay one notes the dramatic appreciation of the U.S. dollar vis-à-vis all world currencies, along with its reversal after a year on the account of the Great Recession. This paper investigates bilateral U.S. dollar exchange rate movements during and in the aftermath of the Great Recession. I find that increasing global market uncertainty has a significant and consistent effect in strengthening of the U.S. dollar. This striking finding suggests flight-to-safety phenomenon of foreign investors, and repatriation of capital flows to the United States by the U.S. investors during and after the last financial crisis. This essay also demonstrates that global investors consider the 3-month and 1-year T-bill, the 5-year T-note, and the 20-year T-bond as the strongest safe haven instruments that can be bought and sold in U.S. dollars.

In essay two, it is noted that existing literature assumes that the euro is a safe haven currency but there is no evidence whether it actually behaves as a safe haven. This essay studies the validity of the safe haven hypothesis for the euro. A safe haven currency works as a hedge in the face of extreme market uncertainty. The results of this research imply that the euro is a safe haven currency if the market uncertainty originates in the U.S. market. I show that there is no significant evidence to suggest that the euro serves as a safe haven currency if the uncertainty originates in the Euro-area. From the standpoint of world investors, however, this paper does not find any Euro-area safe haven asset (other than cash) using the EURO STOXX 50 Index as a measure of uncertainty.

Essay three studies whether the European Central Bank or the Federal Reserve have an influence on monetary policy implementations of each other and other major industrialized countries since the advent of the euro. I find that the Federal Reserve causes an endogenous monetary policy response in the Euro-area, and in other non-US G7 countries, with the exception of Japan, during the conventional monetary policy period of the post-euro era. I also show that exogenous Euro-area conventional monetary policy innovations cause foreign monetary policy endogeneity in Canada and the UK, but do not cause similar endogeneity in the US and Japan. I define foreign monetary policy endogeneity as the reaction of G7 monetary authorities (that persists for at least two time periods) following a monetary policy innovation of the other. The results of this chapter further reveal that, with respect to the G7 economies, U.S. unconventional monetary policy shocks induce endogenous policy reactions only in Japan during the Great Recession and its aftermath. Unconventional monetary policy innovations by the European Central Bank, instead, lead to a response by the monetary authorities of Japan, the UK, and the US.

Access Setting

Dissertation-Open Access

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