The interrelatedness of global equity markets, money markets, and foreign exchange markets

This article investigates different aspects of global financial markets, specifically relationships among equity markets, money markets, and foreign exchange markets across countries. To represent the three major financial markets of the world, Japan is the proxy for Asia, Germany is the proxy for Europe, and the United States is the proxy for North America. Strong evidence exists that international money markets and international equity markets are becoming increasingly integrated over time. This article incorporates foreign exchange values as partial determinants of equity returns and money market returns and investigates the interactions among these three asset markets from a global perspective.     

European foreign exchange market efficiency: Evidence based on crisis and noncrisis periods

This study investigates the impact on foreign exchange market efficiency of the 1992 European financial market crisis by studying precrisis, crisis, and postcrisis periods. Long-term relationships among European currency values are identified during the three periods, although the relationships are not stable during the precrisis and the postcrisis periods. These results may be due to one or more of the following: (1) market inefficiency, (2) a risk premium, or (3) common policy guidelines for European monetary system (EMS) members. Evidence of market inefficiency is strong. Forecasting results demonstrate better performance by an error correction model (ECM) than by a random walk model (RWM) for the British pound and German mark, while results for the French franc and Italian lira are mixed. Dominance tests using Granger causality indicate only weak German mark dominance both in the short and long run.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Emerging markets and portfolio foreign exchange risk: An empirical investigation using a value-at-risk decomposition technique

The correlation between a portfolio's equity and foreign exchange components plays a role in reducing foreign exchange exposure. Investors must account for this correlation when determining the extent of foreign exchange risk in emerging market equity portfolio investments. This study employs a VaR risk factor mapping technique, under the variance–covariance VaR approach, to decompose portfolio risk in Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Mexico and Russia. For comparison purposes, the same technique is used to decompose portfolio risk in the US. The study is conducted from the perspective of a European equity investor with a portfolio of equities in each country. By employing the VaR decomposition technique, the correlation between a portfolio's equity and foreign exchange components is taken into account and portfolio foreign exchange risk is extracted from portfolio systematic risk. Our results uniquely demonstrate significant variation in foreign exchange risk in emerging markets.     

Comparing COVID-19 with the GFC: A shockwave analysis of currency markets

I analyze the shockwave effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on currency markets, with a comparison to the global financial crisis (GFC), employing Kapetanios m-break unit root test, investigations of standalone risk measures—downside variance, upside risk, volatility skewness, Gaussian Value at Risk (VaR), historical VaR, modified VaR—and Diebold–Yilmaz volatility spillover analysis. Standalone risk analysis shows that the turmoil in the initial months of COVID-19 was not as severe as that in the GFC. However, examination of co-movements and volatility spillovers illustrates a different scenario. According to the results of the static connectedness measure of Diebold–Yilmaz, the shockwave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the total volatility spillover is about eight times greater than that of the GFC. Among standalone risk measures, the results closest to this finding are obtained from volatility skewness analysis. Additionally, of six foreign exchange rates, the Brazilian real and Turkish lira are the currencies experiencing the greatest increase in received volatility during the GFC and the COVID-19 pandemic, respectively. These findings suggest the severe effect of crises on emerging financial markets.     

Central European foreign exchange markets: a cross-spectral analysis of the 2007 financial crisis

This article investigates co-movements between currency markets of Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Euro in the year following the drying up of money markets in August 2007. The article shows that assessing the degree of foreign currency co-movement by correlation can lead to concluding, erroneously, that financial contagion has not occurred. Using cross-spectral methods, the article shows that defining contagion as changes in the structure of co-movements of asset prices encompasses more of the complex nature of exchange rate dynamics. What is shown is that, following August 2007, there is increase in the intensity of co-movements, but non-linearly. Focusing on the activities of a mix of banks and currency managers, it is suggested that changes in the structure of currency interaction present an unfavourable view of the contagion experienced by at least three of these currencies.     

Dynamical clustering of exchange rates

We use techniques from network science to study correlations in the foreign exchange (FX) market during the period 1991–2008. We consider an FX market network in which each node represents an exchange rate and each weighted edge represents a time-dependent correlation between the rates. To provide insights into the clustering of the exchange-rate time series, we investigate dynamic communities in the network. We show that there is a relationship between an exchange rate's functional role within the market and its position within its community and use a node-centric community analysis to track the temporal dynamics of such roles. This reveals which exchange rates dominate the market at particular times and also identifies exchange rates that experienced significant changes in market role. We also use the community dynamics to uncover major structural changes that occurred in the FX market. Our techniques are general and will be similarly useful for investigating correlations in other markets.     

Price discovery in foreign exchange markets: A comparison of indicative and actual transaction prices

In this paper, we compare four months of Reuters EFX high frequency indicative data with D2000-1 inter-dealer transaction data for DEM/USD and GBP/USD. Contrary to previous studies, we find, using various information measures, that the matched tick-by-tick indicative data bear no qualitative difference from the transaction data, and have higher information content. Expanding the system to include order flow, due to its growing importance in exchange rate theory, we find that indicative data has a similar impact on order flow as transaction data. However, order flow has no impact on either price.     

Institutional herding in international markets

This paper studies herding behavior of institutional investors in international markets. First, we document the existence of wide-spread herding in 41 countries (referred to as “target countries” hereafter) in the sample. We then examine the relation between contemporaneous institutional demand and future returns and find that institutional herding stabilizes prices. Next, we examine the relation between institutional investors’ herding behavior and the level of information asymmetry in the target countries. We measure the degree of information asymmetry in each target country along five dimensions: (1) stock market development, (2) ease of access to information, (3) corporate transparency, (4) investor rights, and (5) macroeconomic factors that relate to the information environment. We find evidence that institutional investors herd more in markets characterized by low levels of information asymmetry (high level of information transparency). This result suggests that institutional investors’ herding behavior is likely driven by correlated signals from fundamental information. Lastly, we show that price adjustment is faster in informationally transparent markets.     

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.     

Price discovery in spot and futures markets: a reconsideration

We reconsider the issue of price discovery in spot and futures markets. We use a threshold error correction model to allow for arbitrage opportunities to have an impact on the return dynamics. We estimate the model using quote midpoints, and we modify the model to account for time-varying transaction costs. We find that (a) the futures market leads in the process of price discovery and (b) the presence of arbitrage opportunities has a strong impact on the dynamics of the price discovery process.     

Foreign exchange exposure of “domestic” corporations

Unlike prior studies on foreign exchange risk that have focused on multinational companies, this paper documents that domestic companies face significant foreign exchange exposure. Indeed, we document that on average domestic company foreign exchange exposure is not significantly different from the exposures faced by multinational firms. As expected, the number of domestic firms with significant foreign exchange exposure increases with the exposure estimation horizon. More interestingly, the level of domestic firm exposure is significantly negatively related to firm size and asset turnover, and positively related to the market to book ratio and financial leverage. Our results have important implications for managers, policy makers, and accounting standards.     

Triangular arbitrage in the spot and forward foreign exchange markets

Imad Moosa shows that the effect of triangular arbitrage in the forward market is similar to the combined effect of triangular arbitrage in the spot market and covered interest arbitrage. He also shows that when the forward rates are inconsistent then this implies inconsistency of the spot rates and/or the violation of covered interest parity. When the bid-offer spreads are allowed for, the equilibrium conditions hold only approximately.     

On the determinants of Original Sin: an empirical investigation

Most countries do not borrow abroad in their own currency, a fact that has been referred to as “Original Sin”. This paper describes the incidence of the problem and makes an attempt at uncovering its cause. The paper finds weak support for the idea that the level of development, institutional quality, or monetary credibility or fiscal solvency is correlated with Original Sin. Only the absolute size of the economy is robustly correlated. The paper also explores the determinants of a country’s capacity to borrow at home at long duration and in local currency. It finds that monetary credibility and the presence of capital controls are positively correlated with this capacity.     

Interconnected multilayer networks: Quantifying connectedness among global stock and foreign exchange markets

This paper proposes a novel interconnected multilayer network framework based on variance decomposition and block aggregation technique, which can be further served as a tool of linking and measuring cross-market and within-market contagion. We apply it to quantifying connectedness among global stock and foreign exchange (forex) markets, and demonstrate that measuring volatility spillovers of both stock and forex markets simultaneously could support a more comprehensive view for financial risk contagion. We find that (i) stock markets transmit the larger spillovers to forex markets, (ii) the French stock market is the largest risk transmitter in multilayer networks, while some Asian stock markets and most forex markets are net risk receivers, and (iii) interconnected multilayer networks could signal the financial instability during the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis. Our work provides a new perspective and method for studying the cross-market risk contagion.     

Accounting for real exchange rates using micro-data

The classical dichotomy predicts that all of the time-series variance in the aggregate real exchange rate is accounted for by non-traded goods in the consumer price index (CPI) basket because traded goods obey the Law of One Price. In stark contrast, Engel (1999) claimed the opposite: that traded goods accounted for all of the variance. Using micro-data and recognizing that final good prices include both the cost of the goods themselves and local, non-traded inputs into retail such as labor and retail space, our work re-establishes the conceptual value of the classical dichotomy. We also carefully show the role of aggregation, consumption expenditure weighting and assignment of covariance terms in the differences between our findings and those of Engel.