Foreign exchange market efficiency under recent crises: Asia-Pacific focus

The Asia-Pacific region’s currency markets are generally efficient within-country when tested using the 30 and 31 cointegration technique whereas market efficiency fails to hold when tested using Fama’s (1984) conventional regression. Using the Pilbeam and Olmo (2011) model, we reconcile these conflicting findings. The Pilbeam and Olmo (2011) model confirms within-country market efficiency. It further confirms that free-float currency markets are more resilient than managed-float currency markets among 12 Asia-Pacific economies. From the across-country perspective, the foreign exchange markets are mostly efficient and the results show that the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis was a more disturbing event than the 2008–2009 global financial crisis in the region.     

General equilibrium pricing of currency and currency options

This paper presents a consumption-based general equilibrium model for valuing foreign exchange contingent claims. The model identifies a novel economic mechanism by exploiting highly but imperfectly shared consumption disaster with variable intensities which are the concerns to the representative investor under recursive utility. When applied to the data, the model simultaneously replicates (i) the moderate option-implied volatilities; (ii) substantial variations in the risk-neutral skewness of currency returns; (iii) the uncovered interest rate parity puzzle; and (iv) the first two moments of carry trade returns. Furthermore, the model rationalizes salient features of the aggregate stock, government bonds, and equity index options.     

Borrowing in foreign currency: Austrian households as carry traders

Household borrowing in a foreign currency is a widespread phenomenon in Austria. Thirteen percent of Austrian households report their housing loan to be denominated in foreign currency, mostly Swiss franc. Yet, despite its importance, peculiar character, and acute policy concerns, we know little about the attitudes and characteristics of the households involved in this type of carry trade. We analyze a uniquely detailed financial wealth survey of 2556 Austrian households to sketch a comprehensive profile of the attitudes and characteristics of the households involved. We employ both univariate tests and multivariate multinomial logit models. The survey data suggest that risk seeking, affluent, and married households are more likely to take a housing loan in a foreign currency. Financially literate or high-income households are more likely to take a housing loan in general. These findings partially assuage policy concerns about household default risk on foreign-currency housing loans or household retirement security.     

Unraveling the complex interrelationships between exchange rates and fundamentals

This research investigates the intrinsic characteristics of currency values by fundamentally decomposing investor expectations on 16 currencies. The results on 195 exchange rates over several decades indicate investors perceive countries to be more likely to choose devaluation solutions to BOP problems when inflation is lower and when an alternative drop in real income growth is more “painful”. In addition, empirical support is provided for the hypothesis that forward rates often appear biased because the distributional expectations incorporated into them include, for a country with a current account deficit, a small probability of a large spot decline that does not actually occur in most finite samples.     

Exchange rate expectations and the pricing of Chinese cross-listed stocks

I show that the price discounts of Chinese cross-listed stocks (American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) and H-shares) to their underlying A-shares indicate the expected yuan/US dollar exchange rate. The forecasting models reveal that ADR and H-share discounts predict exchange rate changes more accurately than the random walk and forward exchange rates, particularly at long forecast horizons. Using panel estimations, I find that ADR and H-share investors form their exchange rate expectations according to standard exchange rate theories such as the Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson effect, the risk of competitive devaluations, relative purchasing power parity, uncovered interest rate parity, and the risk of currency crisis.     

Are options redundant? Further evidence from currency futures markets

This paper investigates the impact of the introduction of options on the underlying asset's price formation process, using Geweke feedback measures. We derive the feedback measures from the Deutsche Mark, British Pound, Swiss Franc, Japanese Yen and Canadian Dollar futures and spot prices, before and after the introduction of options for these currency futures. While each currency market maintains some distinct characteristics in the post-option period, a common theme is found: after the option introduction, the instantaneous feedback between spot and futures markets improves drastically. The feedback from the spot to the futures market tends to decrease and remains small. The feedback from the futures market to the spot market tends to decrease as well. These results confirm the dominance of options markets, probably due to their smaller transaction costs. When made available, options assume a leading role for information transmission in currency markets.     

The size of banking crises in credible fixed exchange rate regimes

Since monetary policy is constrained in fixed exchange rate regimes, we should observe fewer banking crises due to moral hazard in countries with credible currency pegs. However, three countries with seemingly credible pegs in the nineteen-eighties and -nineties, namely China, Hong Kong and Argentina, still suffered crises in their domestic banking sectors. The present note illustrates that bank incentives to take on excess risk still exist in countries with currency peg credibility and that the size of that risk exposure (and thus the potential for crisis) may be positively related to the level of central bank foreign exchange reserves.     

The impact of capital account liberalization measures

In this paper we analyze whether capital account liberalization leads to higher asset prices. Based on a sample of 242 non-financial firms listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand at the time of the announcement of the relaxation of capital control in Thailand on January 29, 2007, we find positive and significant abnormal returns on Day −2, Day 1, and Day 3 relative to the announcement day. Our findings suggest that capital account liberalization favorably affects stock prices of firms, though the effect varies across industries. From a public policy perspective, our results suggest that liberalizing capital account by relaxing capital control measures could improve firm value in the short-term, which may, in turn, boost the level of economic growth in the long run. In addition, the results show that there is a significant fall in the mean beta in the post-liberalization period, thereby implying the lower cost of capital.     

Global liquidity risk in the foreign exchange market

Using a broad data set of 20 US dollar exchange rates and order flow of institutional investors over 14 years, we construct a measure of global liquidity risk in the foreign exchange (FX) market. Our FX liquidity measure may be seen as the analog of the well-known Pastor–Stambaugh liquidity measure for the US stock market. We show that this measure has reasonable properties, and that there is a strong common component in liquidity across currencies. Finally, we provide evidence that liquidity risk is priced in the cross-section of currency returns, and estimate the liquidity risk premium in the FX market around 4.7 percent per annum.     

Emerging market exchange rate exposure

We estimate the exposure of emerging market companies to fluctuations in their domestic exchange rates. We use an instrumental-variable approach that identifies the total exposure of a company to exchange rate movements, yet abstracts from the influence of confounding macroeconomic shocks. In the sub-period of 1999–2002, we find that depreciations tend to have a negative impact on emerging market stock returns. In the sub-period of 2002–2006, this tendency has largely disappeared. Since we estimate the exchange rate exposure of firms from different countries with a common set of instruments, we can make coherent, cross-country comparisons of their determinants. We find that the impact of various measures of debt on exchange rate exposure, which is negative and significant in the early sub-period, becomes insignificant and even reverses sign in the recent sub-period.     

Predictable dynamics in implied volatility surfaces from OTC currency options

Recent empirical studies report predictable dynamics in the volatility surfaces that are implied by observed index option prices, such as those prescribed by general equilibrium models. Using an extensive data set from the over-the-counter options market, we document similar predictability in the factors that capture the daily variation of surfaces implied by options on 25 different foreign exchange rates. We proceed to demonstrate that simple vector autoregressive specifications for the factors can help produce accurate out-of-sample forecasts of the systematic component of the surface at short horizons. Profitable delta-hedged positions can be set up based on these forecasts; however, profits disappear when typical transaction costs are taken into account and when trading rules on wide segments of the surface are sought.     

Day-of-the-week effect in the Taiwan foreign exchange market

This study uses stochastic dominance with and without risk-free assets to examine whether trading days can affect patterns of the day-of-the-week effect in the Taiwan foreign exchange market. Our results generally indicate that higher returns appear on the first three days of the week across different trading-day regimes in the Taiwan foreign exchange market, confirming day-of-the-week effect. Allocating part of investors’ assets in risk-free assets is useful in distinguishing returns among weekdays for all currencies.     

Portfolio reallocation and exchange rate dynamics

This paper explains exchange rate dynamics by linking financial customers’ foreign exchange order flow with their dynamic portfolio reallocation. For any currency pair in a particular period, one currency has higher assets return than the other and can be considered the high-return-currency (HRC). Financial institutions attempt to hold more HRC assets when they become more risk-loving or the relative return of the assets is expected to increase. Such a portfolio reallocation generates buy order toward the HRC and the currency appreciates. As the HRC changes over time, the direction that the relative return and risk appetite affect the exchange rate varies in different regimes.     

Lessons from the evolution of foreign exchange trading strategies

The adaptive markets hypothesis posits that trading strategies evolve as traders adapt their behavior to changing circumstances. This paper studies the evolution of trading strategies for a hypothetical trader who chooses portfolios from foreign exchange (forex) technical rules in major and emerging markets, the carry trade, and US equities. The results show that a backtesting procedure to choose optimal portfolios improves upon the performance of nonadaptive rules. We also find that forex trading alone dramatically outperforms the S&P 500, with much larger Sharpe ratios over the whole sample, but there is little gain to coordinating forex and equity strategies, which explains why practitioners consider these tools separately. Forex trading returns dip significantly in the 1990s but recover by the end of the decade and have been markedly superior to an equity position since 1998. Overall, trading rule returns still exist in forex markets—with substantial stability in the types of rules—though they have migrated to emerging markets to a considerable degree.     

Cross-border trading as a mechanism for implicit capital flight: ADRs and the Argentine crisis

Cross-listed shares may confound government efforts to control capital outflows by providing a legal means through which investors can transfer their wealth outside the country. We study the recent experience of investors who while subject to capital controls, were able to purchase cross-listed shares using local currency, convert them into dollar-denominated shares, re-sell them abroad, and deposit the dollar proceeds in foreign bank accounts. Capital controls drive a wedge between the price of local shares and their corresponding cross-listed shares. This wedge provides an implicit devaluation forecast and the market's valuation of capital control circumvention.     

Trading volume and exchange rate volatility: Evidence for the sequential arrival of information hypothesis

The relationship between trading volume and volatility in foreign exchange markets continues to be of much interest, especially given the higher than expected volatility of returns. Allowing for nonlinearities, this paper tests competing hypotheses on the possible relationship between volatility and trading volume using data for three major currency futures contracts denominated in US dollars, namely the British pound, the Canadian dollar and the Japanese yen. We find that trading volumes and return volatility are negatively correlated, implying a lack of support for the mixture of distributions hypothesis (MDH). Using linear and nonlinear Granger causality tests, we document significant lead-lag relations between trading volumes and return volatility consistent with the sequential arrival of information (SAI) hypothesis. These findings are robust and not sample-dependent or due to heterogeneity of beliefs as proxied by open interest. Furthermore, our results are insensitive to the modeling approach used to recover volatility measures. Overall, our findings support the contention that short- to medium-term currency relationships may be dominated by trading dynamics and not by fundamentals.     

Transmission of the financial and sovereign debt crises to the EMU: Stock prices,CDS spreads and exchange rates

This paper tests for the transmission of the 2007–2010 financial and sovereign debt crises to fifteen EMU countries. We use daily data from 2003 to 2010 on country financial and non-financial stock market indexes to analyze the stock market returns for three country groups within EMU: North, South and Small. The following results hold for both the North and South European countries, while the smallest countries seem to be relatively isolated from international events. First, we find strong evidence of crisis transmission to European non-financials from US non-financials, but not for financials. Second, in order to test how the sovereign debt crisis affects stock market developments we split the crisis in pre- and post-Lehman sub periods. Results show that financials become significantly more dependent on changes in the difference between the Greek and German CDS spreads after Lehman’s collapse, compared to the pre-Lehman sub period. However, this increase is much smaller for non-financials. Third, before the crisis euro appreciations coincide with European stock market decreases, whereas this relationship reverses during the crisis. Finally, this reversal seems to be triggered by Lehman’s collapse.     

A re-examination of exposure to exchange rate risk: The impact of earnings management and currency derivative usage

In an attempt to explain the weak evidence of priced exchange rate risk, we hypothesize that in addition to currency derivative usages, earnings management serves as another factor contributing to a reduction in exchange rate exposure. Our evidence reveals that earnings management activities, particularly those undertaken for the purpose of income smoothing, significantly reduce firm-specific exchange rate exposure, and that such role is particularly important if appropriate currency derivative instruments are limited. These results complement prior attempts to explain the puzzle of unpriced exchange rate risk. The investigation also highlights the importance of recognizing different managerial purposes behind discretionary accruals.     

The exchange rate effect of multi-currency risk arbitrage

Carry trade arbitrage strategies typically involve multiple currencies. Limits to arbitrage in such a setting not only slow the adjustment to the fundamental equilibrium, but can also generate transitory over- or undershooting of each exchange rate in accordance with the marginal risk contribution of each speculative position to the overall arbitrage risk. The paper uses a natural experiment to identify a particular global arbitrage opportunity and shows that arbitrage risk hedging modifies the exchange rate dynamics in the predicted manner. New spectral methods are applied to obtain a more precise inference on the cross-sectional trading pattern of the arbitrageurs.     

Price discovery in currency markets

This paper examines the price discovery process in currency markets, basing its analysis on the pivotal distinction between the customer (end-user) market and the interdealer market. It first provides evidence that this price discovery process cannot be based on adverse selection between dealers and their customers, as postulated in standard models, because the spreads dealers quote to their customers are not positively related to a trade’s likely information content. The paper then highlights three factors familiar in the literature – fixed operating costs, market power, and strategic dealing – that may explain the cross-sectional variation in customers’ spreads. The paper finishes by proposing a price discovery process relevant to liquid two-tier markets and providing preliminary evidence that this process applies to currencies.