Puzzles And Essays From The Exchange

Who said that? When did that happen? Where the heck does that thing come from? Was that French, or what? What's that supposed to mean? For 35 years, librarians in the United States and other countries sent puzzles they could not solve locally to “The Exchange,” a column for reference librarians appearing in RQ (and later, RUSQ), the official journal of the Reference and User Services Division of the ALA. Other readers often furnished the answers--sometimes years or even decades later! Puzzles and Essays from “The Exchange” organizes those perplexing questions and answers into a reader-friendly reference format, embellished with essays that appeared in the column over the last fifteen years of its publication. This unique collection of questions and answers that stumped librarians on four continents over a 35-year period comes complete with authoritative bibliographic citations. It also contains an extensive subject, person, and keyword index, providing easy access to the material. Packed with fascinating information, little-known trivia, and hard-to-find facts, Puzzles and Essays from “The Exchange” is a wonderful reference source, answering difficult questions about: the origins of common--and not-so-common-customs, like giving engagement rings, driving on the right or left side of the road, tying yellow ribbons around trees in memory of captives, leg shaving, visits from the “Tooth Fairy,” and much, much more! the origins of words, phrases, and terms that don’t, when taken literally, make much sense the origins of popular sayings--The grass is always greener; The whole nine yards; It ain't over until the fat lady sings; Close but no cigar; Going down the tube; Light at the end of the tunnel; Katy, bar the door; Goodbye, cruel world; etc. the sources of famous quotations--both spurious and real! the sources of poetry fragments and bits of verse that have become part of the popular lexicon hard-to-find biographical information-from George Washington Carver's many uses for the peanut and the sweet potato to the name of Paul Revere's horse to the truth about the “let them eat cake” story attributed to Marie Antoinette trivia and miscellany--how lullabies began; why a yawn is contagious when a sneeze is not; what the names of the monkeys in The Wizard of Oz were; why pigeons bob their heads when they walk; what the vital statistics of the Venus de Milo are; and much more! the history of “The Exchange” itself! Puzzles and Essays from “The Exchange” will also challenge you with a list of so-far unanswered questions, unidentified quotations, and popular sayings whose origins are still generally unknown. Perhaps you’ll be the one to answer the riddles that stumped the editors and readers of “The Exchange!”

The paper develops a flow model of the exchange rate with speculative capital flows integrated in a rigorous manner. The model is consistent with five foreign exchange market puzzles: (1) occasional discontinuous jumps in the exchange rate; (2) periodic short-term regimes of persistent appreciation/depreciation that can develop into a long swing; (3) the forward discount bias; (4) volatility clusters in the foreign exchange market that create conditional heteroskedasticity; and (5) the dual profitability of betting in the short run against any official foreign exchange intervention, and betting with the intervention in the long run.

Still after more than thirty years of free floating exchange rates, large parts of exchange rate dynamics remain a puzzle. As this book shows, much progress has been made in explaining exchange rate movements over longer horizons. It also shows, however, that short-run movements are far more challenging to explain. The book is based upon a variety of papers, many of them released recently. A key aspiration of the literature has always been not only to explain past exchange rate behavior but also to forecast out of sample and to compare it to the simple random walk outcome. Here some development has been made after Meese and Rogoff's (1983) truculent verdict of the performance of common exchange rate models. By means of empirical analysis and descriptive statistics this book further supports the established long-run relationships between exchange rates and fundamentals such as expected productivity growth, real GDP growth, domestic investment, interest rates, inflation, government spending, and current account balances. It finds that these fundamentals affect the exchange rate to varying degrees over time. Turning to short-term exchange rate dynamics, it turns out that a different set of forces is at play. The key to explaining short-run movements is to be found in an extensive micro-foundation that factors in a pronounced heterogeneity among market participants and information asymmetries, as well as the possibility of sudden shifts in sentiment, beliefs, and the degree of risk aversion. Promising results have been obtained by order-flow analysis and high frequency data. Also, the consideration of chartism and speculators facilitates understanding for otherwise puzzling exchange rate movements. The last attempt to tackle the understanding of exchange rate behavior is the use of frequency domain analysis and in particular spectral analysis which tries to track down any cyclical patterns in the various moments of time series. And as we shall see forex indeed incorpor

This thesis consists of three essays on international finance. The first essay is "Exchange rates and Fundamentals". A new open interest rate parity condition that takes account of economic fundamentals is developed from stochastic discount factors (SDFs) of two countries. Through this parity condition, business cycles or fundamentals are linked to exchange rates. Key empirical findings from this parity condition are as follows. First, this model beats the random walk hypothesis: economic fundamentals explain exchange rate movements for high interest rate currencies. Exchange rates of low interest rate currencies act like a random walk because they are less correlated with fundamentals owing to their low risk. For example, U.S. business cycles explain the direction of changes in exchange rates against the dollar. The same thing is true for Japan. Second, this model resolves the forward premium puzzle: the forward premium puzzle is not a general characteristic as regarded in previous studies. It happens when the risk awareness of investors is low, during economic expansions and for low risk currencies. The second essay is "Carry Trade and Global Financial Instability". Carry trade, an opportunistic investment strategy that takes advantage of interest rate differential across countries, is identified the cause of the large-scale depreciations of peripheral currencies in the later half of 2008. A simultaneous equations model, which is derived from a conceptual partial equilibrium model for a local foreign exchange market, is estimated from a cross-sectional sample. The results suggest that the larger appreciation of the yen than the dollar was brought about by a lack of the local supply of the yen rather than a more severe crunch of yen credits. The third essay is "The Economic Origin of Letters of Credit". This essay discusses the economic origin of letters of credit, an instrument widely used in international trade. A game theoretical analysis shows that letters of credit improve efficiency in trade settlements, increasing returns in trade. A few notable facts on letters of credit are discussed. First, the new institution is adopted by merchant banks to maximize their profits and in the process, an improvement in efficiency of international transactions is obtained. Second, the organization established by the legacy institution, bills of exchange, played a critical role in adopting the new institution. Third, the legal enforcement is not essential in this economic institution. Finally, two drivers are identified that improve efficiency of transactions: concentration and projection.

This study assesses how versatile are the techniques of classical anthropology when confronted by the ethnographically unfamiliar. Each essay seeks to elucidate an empirical problem through orthodox and heterodox uses of standard techniques.

This book looks at the PPP persistence puzzle, and econometric aspects of exchange rate dynamics and their implications. It also explores the importance of exchange rate dynamics in the pass-through effects (PTE) and the econometric aspects of the exchange rates dynamics linked to structural shocks on different economies.

Digital Reference Services provides an overview of electronic reference services and software, and explores the opportunities that real-time digital reference services can offer in a variety of library settings. Experts in the field offer numerous reports and theory about the evolution of this new approach to answering reference questions. This well-referenced volume contains case examples, figures, useful Web sites, and case histories to show how the basic principles of digital reference services work. Librarians and students of information and library science will find this book helpful to enhance their library and electronic reference expertise.