11:20 - 13:00
P12
Room:
Room: Meeting Room 2.1
Panel Session 12
Vytautas Kuokštis - Labor Market Flexibility and Exchange Rate Regimes
David Weyrauch - The Belt and Road Initiative and its Impact on Voting in the United Nations General Assembly
Cristina Bodea - The Financial Determinants of Party Manifestos: US-Monetary Cycles and Neo-liberal Politics
Michael A. Gavin - The International Monetary Fund and Central Bank Capabilities
Ryan Weldzius - Regional Monetary Policy Convergence
Regional Monetary Policy Convergence
P12-4
Presented by: Ryan Weldzius
Ryan Weldzius
Villanova University
The relative absence of currency conflict between many export-dependent states is puzzling given the success of competitive exchange rate policies in the development stories of many states. Weldzius (2021) suggests that global supply chain trade has contributed to the “end of currency manipulation” due to the decreased benefits of this beggar-thy-neighbor policy, but he does not address the transmission mechanism for the policy shift. In this paper, I address this transmission mechanism, arguing that intensified interdependence between countries has constrained the monetary policy choices of central banks, in particular, “nonhegemonic” central banks. These non-hegemonic central banks consider the impact of policy divergence from the hegemon in their regional trading bloc. The hegemon sets policy according to some exogenous rule, the outcome of which has spillover effects on the non-hegemons’ policy choices. The more interdepedence between the non-hegemon and hegemon, the more likely the non-hegemon converges on the hegemon’s monetary policy (cf. Bearce 2009). I test this theory by analyzing the central bank minutes and policy reports of 34 central banks in four regional trading blocs (North America, South America, Europe, and East/Southeast Asia) between 2000 and 2020. Using both unsupervised and supervised machine learning techniques, I measure how much non-hegemonic central banks are influenced by the monetary policy set by their regional hegemon (ECB, Fed, BoJ, and PBOC), conditional on the intensity of economic interdependence measured as global supply chain integration. I will support the quantitative analyses with three case studies of Argentina, Switzerland, and Thailand.