The effects of central bank extraordinary measures on financial conditions: Evidence from Mexico

This paper analyses the effects of the extraordinary measures implemented by the Central Bank of Mexico during the COVID-19 pandemic on financial conditions. For this purpose, we estimate a factor-augmented vector autoregressive model for the period 2001–2021. Based on this model, we construct a Financial Conditions Index, estimate the response of this indicator and its components from a shock to the outstanding amount of these measures, and conduct a counterfactual exercise to further analyse the effect of the aforementioned measures. The main results indicate that these extraordinary measures seem to have contributed to improve financial conditions. In particular, we find that if these measures had not been implemented, the sovereign risk premium, the 10-year government bond yield, the slope of the yield curve, and the long- and short-term yield spreads between Mexico and the US would have been higher by around 56, 31, 27, 37, and 49 basis points in December 2020, respectively. At the same time, the Mexican peso/US dollar exchange rate and its volatility would have been higher by 5 and 2 percentage points, respectively. In turn, the Mexican stock market index would have been lower by 10 percentage points. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Reinvestigating the Co-Movements between Stock Market and Exchange Rates: An Augmented Vector Autoregression Analysis

Empirical works on the stock market exchange rate nexus remain scanty in the managed floating exchange rate environment like Nigeria. Thus, our paper contributes to the scanty literature by analyzing how the COVID19 pandemic shapes the existing link in the oil-rich countries like Nigeria using a time series approach based on daily data spanning between 2017 and 2021. The paper investigates a Granger causality relationship in the specified VAR model by implementing the Toda and Yamamoto procedures while determining the direction of the causality through our impulse response analysis. Our findings show unidirectional causality from exchange rates to the stock market in the pandemic but no causality before the pandemic. This suggests that the exchange rate affects the performance of the Nigerian stock market in the pandemic period. Therefore, the Nigerian stock market and the exchange rate should not be considered as alternative strategies to mitigate risk during the crisis periods.