Publikationen Fratzscher

The Scapegoat Theory of Exchange Rates: The First Tests

The scapegoat theory of exchange rates (2 and 5) suggests that market participants may attach excessive weight to individual economic fundamentals, which are picked as “scapegoats” to rationalize observed currency fluctuations at times when exchange rates are driven by unobservable shocks. Using novel survey data that directly measure foreign exchange scapegoats for 12 exchange rates, we find empirical ...

China's Dominance Hypothesis and the Emergence of a Tri-polar Global Currency System

This study assesses whether the international monetary system is already tri-polar by testing what we call China's ‘dominance hypothesis’, i.e. whether the renminbi already influences exchange rate and monetary policies strongly in Asia, a direct reference to the old ‘German dominance hypothesis’ which ascribed to the German mark a dominant role in Europe in the 1980s. Using a global factor model of ...

Central Bank Communication on Financial Stability

Central banks regularly communicate about financial stability issues. This article asks how such communications affect financial markets, based on a unique dataset covering more than 1,000 releases of Financial Stability Reports (FSRs) and speeches by 37 central banks over the past 14 years. The findings suggest that optimistic FSRs lead to significant and potentially long-lasting positive abnormal ...

The Global Crisis and Equity Market Contagion

We analyze the transmission of the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis to 415 country-industry equity portfolios. We use a factor model to predict crisis returns, defining unexplained increases in factor loadings and residual correlations as indicative ofcontagion. While we find evidence of contagion from the United States and the global financial sector, the effects are small. By contrast, there has been ...

Asset Prices, News Shocks, and the Trade Balance

We analyze the relationship between asset prices and the trade balance estimating a Bayesian VAR for a broad set of 38 industrialized and emerging market countries. To derive model-based identifying restrictions, we model asset price shocks as news shocks about future productivity in a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. Such shocks are found to exert sizable effects on the trade ...

The Pricing of Sovereign Risk and Contagion during the European Sovereign Debt Crisis

The paper analyses the drivers of sovereign risk for 31 advanced and emerging economies during the European sovereign debt crisis. It shows that a deterioration in countries' fundamentals and fundamentals contagion - a sharp rise in the sensitivity of financial markets to fundamentals - are the main explanations for the rise in sovereign yield spreads and CDS spreads during the crisis, not only for ...

Dispersed Communication by Central Bank Committees and the Predictability of Monetary Policy Decisions

The paper asks whether members of central bank decision-making committees should communicate with the public in a collegial manner, by conveying the consensus or majority view of the committee, or in an individualistic way, by providing the diversity of views among the committee members. It finds that more active as well as more consistent communication by committee members improves the predictability ...

Die EZB-Geldpolitik in der Zwickmühle

Ein Investitionsprogramm zur Krisenbewältigung

Wirtschaftspolitik in der Corona-Krise: Stabilisierung muss durch eine kluge Transformationspolitik ergänzt werden