Foreign exchange intervention and equilibrium real exchange rates

Monetary authorities intervene in the currency markets in order to pursue a monetary rule and/or to smooth exchange rate volatility caused by speculative attacks. In the present paper we investigate for possible intervention effects on the volatility of nominal exchange rates and the estimated equilibrium behaviour of real exchange rates. The main argument of the paper is that omission of intervention effects – when they are significant – would bias the ability to detect any PPP-based behaviour of the real exchange rates in the long run. Positive evidence for this argument comes from the experience of six Central and Eastern European economies, whose exchange markets are characterised by frequent interventions.     

Large versus small foreign exchange interventions

We use non-temporal threshold analysis to investigate the exchange rate effects of large versus small interventions. More than two decades of official daily data on intervention in the JPY/USD market facilitate our analysis. We find no evidence that small interventions exert a discernible influence on the exchange rate while large interventions significantly influence the exchange rate in the theoretically consistent manner. We conclude that small interventions may not be considered a determinant of the exchange rate while large interventions constitute an important element in our understanding, and modeling, of the exchange rate.     

Price clustering in foreign exchange spot markets

This paper documents the existence of price clustering in the foreign exchange spot market for the German mark, the Japanese yen, the United Kingdom pound, the French franc, the Italian lira, and the Swedish krona. The U.S. dollar exchange rate indicative quotes for these currencies tend to exhibit clustering around right-most digits that end in either a “zero” or a “five.” The tendency for exchange rates to cluster has increased with increases in trading volume and volatility. Moreover, the tendency for exchange rates to cluster differs across currencies.     

The day-of-the-week effect in foreign exchange markets: multi-currency evidence

To investigate to what extent transaction mechanism matters, we examine the daily returns of 29 foreign exchange rates in the New York market. This paper finds that the day-of-the-week effect existed in the 1980s for some, not all, currencies. The fact that the day-of-the-week effect existed for only some currencies suggests that the US transaction mechanism alone cannot explain the anomaly. Furthermore, this paper finds that the day-of-the-week effect disappears for almost all currencies in the 1990s. This latter result is consistent with previous studies on anomalies in the stock markets.     

Explaining the accounting disclosure index of stock exchanges by foreign exchange market activity

In this article, researcher-created accounting disclosure index of 23 stock exchanges for the year 1992 and its relationship with variables including foreign exchange turnover, economic and financial indicators were investigated. The accounting disclosure index of global stock exchanges crafted by Adhikari and Tondkar (1992) was regressed on foreign market turnover which was utilized as a proxy for foreign exchange market activity. The OLS results supported that along with the activity of foreign exchange market; GNI per capita, market capitalization, energy and electric consumption, number of listed companies were significantly related with the accounting disclosure index. The foreign market turnover was found to be positively influencing the accounting disclosure index. The models explained about 73% of the variation in the index with an F-ratio of 26.56 indicating the overall significance of the model.     

Reported and secret interventions in the foreign exchange markets

Using a new approach relying on news wire reports, we estimate the proportion of secret interventions (i.e., unreported official interventions) in the foreign exchange markets that have been conducted by the three major central banks since 1985. We therefore revisit the estimation of conditional probabilities of secret operations and compute them by both central bank and operation type. The proportion of secret interventions is found to be lower for concerted operations and to display a great deal of variability over time as well as across the three major central banks. Our analysis reveals that the Bank of Japan has recently adopted an intervention policy more based on secret operations.     

The impact of the U.S. employment report on exchange rates

The impact of the U.S. Employment Report and analyst forecasts of that report’s major statistics on Pound/Dollar, Yen/Dollar, and Euro/Dollar exchange rates are explored. While the nonfarm payroll employment figure has the greatest impact, we find that the exchange rates also react to the announced revision to last month’s payroll figure and to the unemployment rate. In all three markets, the exchange rate response to the payroll employment figure is strongly conditioned on pre-release analyst uncertainty. The median analyst forecast from Bloomberg anticipates over 80% of the monthly variation in the payroll figure and is basically unbiased. The markets appear to respond to these analyst forecasts prior to the government release. Analyst forecast dispersion tends to increase following large forecast errors indicating that when the announced figure is far from what analysts expected, they tend to disagree on the implications for future payroll levels.     

Tick test accuracy in foreign exchange ECN markets

Recent computer quoting activity has increased the allure of the tick test because the quote rule and its variants require matching asynchronous trade and quote records. We find tick test accuracy of 1.2 million forex trades is about 67% which falls to 63% for zerotick trades (half the sample). Accuracy declines as quoted spreads decrease and as time to the previous trade increases. We observe extreme asymmetry for midquote changes, where buyer accuracy is 96% (27%) for up (down) changes, respectively. The quote rule is about 77% accurate. The group tick test is superior to the bulk volume classification method.     

Market structure and dealers’ quoting behavior in the foreign exchange market

This article examines how differently the same dealer quotes in the inter-dealer and customer foreign exchange markets that have different market structures. The model first predicts that customer spreads are generally wider than inter-dealer ones due to less transparency in the customer market. The model also predicts that since customers are believed to be less informed than dealers, the differential between customer and inter-dealer spreads tends to fall with the rise in order sizes. In addition, the dealer's mid-quotes are shown to be the same in the two markets. Empirical evidence based on data collected from a FX dealer supports these theoretical findings.     

Conditional volatility persistence and volatility spillovers in the foreign exchange market

I investigate the magnitudes and determinants of volatility spillovers in the foreign exchange (FX) market, using realized measures of volatility and heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) models. I confirm both meteor shower effects (i.e., inter-regional volatility spillovers) and heat wave effects (i.e., intra-regional volatility spillovers) in the FX market. Furthermore, I find that conditional volatility persistence is the dominant channel linking the changing market states of each region to future volatility and its spillovers. Market state variables contribute to more than half of the explanatory power in predicting conditional volatility persistence, with the model that calibrates volatility persistence and spillovers conditionally on market states performing statistically and economically better. The utilization of market state variables significantly extends our understanding of the economic mechanisms of volatility persistence and spillovers and sheds new light on econometric techniques for volatility modeling and forecasting.     

Valuing foreign exchange rate derivatives with a bounded exchange process

Foreign exchange rates have been subjected to periods of tighter or looser controls as various political and economic forces have waxed and waned. When currencies were backed by gold there were fixed exchange rates. In 1973 floating exchange rates were adopted though many countries did try to keep their currency values within certain ranges. More recently the European Economic Community formalized this practice. Free-floating exchange rates might be well characterized by the lognormal distribution which is standard in option pricing. However, this is probably a poor approximation for exchange rates which are kept within some range by the actions of one or both governments or central banks. This paper develops a model which can be used to value options and other derivative contracts when the underlying exchange rate is bounded in a fixed range (a, b). Methods for pricing both European and American style options are developed.The author would like to thank Ken French and Geert Rouwenhorst for their comments and suggestions.     

Technical analysis profitability when exchange rates are pegged: A note

Abstract

This note extends earlier results which concluded that generally technical analysis trading rules were profitable when applied to several US dollar exchange rates. These results were linked to the presence of long swings in the dollar series, and here, it is tested whether they still hold in a different setting, with a quasi-fixed exchange rate system. Applying non-parametric and parametric tests to the main European currencies does not allow to confirm, in this case, the profitability of these rules. These results strengthen the likelihood of the hypothesis of a causal link from the exchange rate DGP to the profitability of technical analysis trading rules, as already highlighted in several articles.     

Foreign exchange exposure and multinationality

We examine the relation between firms’ foreign exchange exposure and the extent of their multinationality as a proxy for operational hedging. Using a sample of 953 US firms over the period 1999–2006, we show that there is a nonlinear relation between operational and financial hedging, confirming anecdotal evidence that many highly multinational firms do not hedge with derivatives. We find that operational hedging and financial hedging are significantly inversely related to firms’ foreign exchange exposure, providing evidence that the two hedging techniques are complementary for all but the most highly operationally hedged firms. By comparing our findings for 1999–2006 with 1999–2009, we show that this complementarity breaks down when exchange rate volatility is high – as the effectiveness of financial hedging diminishes. An important message for firms is that operational hedges work, and they potentially provide better protection than financial hedging during times of stress.     

Leverage, imports, profitability, exchange rates, and capital investment: a panel data study of the textile and apparel industries 1974-1987

This paper explores the relationship between capital structure and import competition for the textile and apparel industries from 1974-1987. The level of import penetration should have an important effect on business risk and hence on financial leverage. We also examine the response of leverage to the interrelationships that may exist between import competition and three other factors: firm profitability, strength of the dollar, and investment in capital equipment.The evidence suggests that leverage for the textile firms increases with rising imports but that the effect is less marked if the imports are the result of a strengthening dollar. The textile firms also seem to have inaugurated a capital investment campaign in reaction to import competition. For apparel firms, the interrelationship between profitability and import penetration seems to have been the primary determinant of leverage.     

Regime-switching models for exchange rates

This study provides evidence of periodically collapsing bubbles in the British pound to US dollar exchange rate in the post-1973 period. We develop two- and three-state regime-switching (RS) models that relate the expected exchange rate return to the bubble size and to an additional explanatory variable. Specifically, we consider six alternative explanatory variables that have been proposed in the literature as early warning indicators of a currency crisis. Our findings suggest that the RS models are, in general, more accurate than the Random Walk model in terms of both statistical and especially economic evaluation criteria for exchange rate forecasts. Our three-state RS model outperforms the two-state models and among the variables considered in our analysis, the short-term interest rate is the optimal variable, closely followed by imports. Results are more promising for one-month predictions and are qualitatively robust over sample spans. However, various robustness checks based on other exchange rates show that the optimal bubble measures and optimal predictors critically depend on the exchange rate.     

Macroeconomic announcements and price discovery in the foreign exchange market

This study shows that the dominance of the overlapping trading hours of London and New York in the price discovery of the EUR/USD and USD/JPY markets only applies on days with U.S. announcements. Different from Cai et al. (2008) and Wang and Yang (2011), we highlight the informational advantage of local traders at the arrival of macroeconomic announcements in the local market, and find that macroeconomic announcements affect the pattern of price discovery across different markets, consistent with Chen and Gau (2010) and Jiang et al. (2012). We also examine changes in information shares before and after the announcement. A significant increase in price discovery before the announcement suggests the possibility of information leakage, while enhanced price discovery efficacy after the announcement suggests that prices gradually adjust to new information, not just immediately respond to the arrival of announcements.     

Fractional cointegration and real exchange rates

This paper uses fractional integration and cointegration to model the DM-US dollar and the yen-US dollar real exchange rates in terms of both monetary and real factors, more specifically real interest rate and labour productivity differentials. We find that whilst the individual series may be integrated of order 1, their long-run relationship might have a fractionally cointegrated structure. This means that mean reversion occurs, consistently with the findings of other studies. However, it also indicates, in contrast to such studies, that the cointegrating relationship possesses long memory. In other words, the error correction term responds slowly to shocks, implying that deviations from equilibrium are long-lived. It appears that only a combination of real and monetary variables can accurately track down the movements of real exchange rates.     

Foreign exchange risk and the cross-section of stock returns

We examine the relation between the cross-section of US stock returns and foreign exchange rates during the period from 1973 to 2002. We find that stocks most sensitive to foreign exchange risk (in absolute value) have lower returns than others. This implies a non-linear, negative premium for foreign exchange risk. Sensitivity to foreign exchange generates a cross-sectional spread in stock returns unexplained by existing asset-pricing models. Consequently, we form a zero-investment factor related to foreign exchange-sensitivity and show that it can reduce mean pricing errors for exchange-sensitive portfolios. One possible explanation for our findings includes Johnson's [2004. Forecast dispersion and the cross-section of expected returns. Journal of Finance, 59, 1957–1978] option-theoretic model in which expected returns are decreasing in idiosyncratic cashflow volatility.     

Generating currency trading rules from the term structure of forward foreign exchange premia

The quality of an exchange rate forecasting model has typically been judged relative to a random-walk in terms of out-of-sample forecast errors. The difficulty of outperforming this benchmark is well documented, although Clarida and Taylor have demonstrated how the random walk can be beaten in this metric by exploiting information embedded within the term structure of forward exchange rate premia. But this achievement does not guarantee success within an investment context. We therefore assess whether the Clarida-Taylor framework can be used to generate significant trading profits in combination with an acceptable degree of risk in a realistic investment portfolio context.     

The analysis of foreign exchange data using waveform dictionaries

This paper uses waveform dictionaries to decompose the signals contained within three foreign exchange rates using tick-by-tick observations obtained world wide. The three exchange rates examined are the Japanese Yen and the German Deutsche Mark against the U.S. dollar and the Deutsche Mark against the Yen. The data were provided by Olsen Associates.A wabeform dictionary is a class of transforms that generalizes both windowed Fourier transforms and wavelets. Each waveform is parameterized by location, frequency, and scale. Such transforms can analyze signals that have highly localized structures in either time or frequency space as well as broad band structures; that is, waveforms can, in principle, detect everything from shocks represented by Dirac Delta functions, to short bursts of energy within a narrow band of frequencies, to the presence of frequencies that occur sporadically, and finally to the presence of frequencies that hold over the entire observed period. Waveform dictionaries are most useful in analyzing data that are not stationary and non-stationarity up to second order is well recognized in the context of foreign exchange rates.