Central banks and macroeconomic policy choices: Relaxing the trilemma

Macroeconomic policy choices in open economies are constrained by the trilemma according to which the objectives of exchange rate stability, monetary independence and capital mobility cannot be attained jointly. This paper shows that foreign exchange interventions provide an effective instrument to relax the trilemma. An active reserve policy allows central banks to pursue independent monetary and exchange rate policies when the capital account is liberalised.We use the framework of the portfolio balance model to show that exchange market interventions may substitute for capital controls. Both allow a country to achieve the other two objectives of the trilemma. Our empirical analysis of a large country panel data set covering the period 1970–2010 confirms this theoretical insight: the weighted sum of the three trilemma objectives increases in the degree of foreign exchange market intervention. The capacity to relax the trilemma constraint has increased over time and has been most effective in emerging markets.     

Specialist participation and limit orders

We present a market microstructure model to examine specialist's strategic participation decisions in a security market where there are noise traders, limit order traders, an insider and a specialist. We argue that the specialist's participation rate depends on the depth of the limit book and its uncertainty. In particular, the specialist has incentives to trade against the market trend when the limit book depth is low and to trade with the market trend when the depth is high. Moreover, the specialist's participation rate is positively related to the limit book depth uncertainty and the asset price volatility, but is negative related to the average trading volume. We also discuss the specialist's participation strategies under the NYSE regulation that prohibits the specialist from trading with the market trend.     

Commonalities in the order book

This paper uses data from one of the most important European stock markets and shows that, in line with predictions from theoretical market microstructure, a small number of latent factors captures most of the variation in stock specific order books. We show that these order book commonalities are much stronger than liquidity commonality across stocks. The result that bid and ask side as well as the visible and hidden parts of the order book exhibit quite specific dynamics is interpreted as evidence that open order book markets attract a heterogeneous trader population in terms of asset valuations and impatience. Quantifying the informational content of the extracted factors with respect to the evolution of the asset price, we find that the factor information shares are highest (about 10%) for less frequently traded stocks. We also show that the informational content of hidden orders is limited.

Volatility and market structure

This study examines volatility within three related intra-day series – transaction returns, quote midpoint returns, and limit order book midpoint returns – for a set of NYSE-listed stocks. We document statistically significant GARCH effects both overall and surrounding earnings announcements in all three series for the majority of stocks in the sample. We then compare the extent of volatility clustering among the series. In addition, the relation between volatility and market structure is examined via a set of cross-sectional regressions, and relations among the series over time are studied in a vector autoregressive framework.     

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.     

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.     

Modelling the shape of the limit order book

This article develops a parsimonious way to use the shape of the limit order book to produce an estimate of the asset price. The posited model captures and describes the evolution of the distribution of limit orders on the bid and ask sides of the LOB during the trading session and provides estimates of the execution asset price over time. The performance of the model is evaluated against some existing standards from the market microstructure literature during the trading session. Empirical evidence on listed companies confirm a strong contribution of our methodology to the innovation in asset prices, according to the information share coefficients. We also document a significant improvement relative to the Hasbrouck [J. Finance, 1991, 46, 179–207] model when our model estimates are included as regressors.