Search Results
Working Paper
An analysis of Japanese foreign exchange interventions, 1991-2002
The effectiveness of Japanese interventions over the past decade depended in large part on the frequency and size of the transactions. Prior to June 1995, Japanese interventions only had value as a forecast that the previous day's yen appreciation or depreciation would moderate during the current day. After June 1995, Japanese purchases of dollars had value as a forecast that the yen would depreciate. Probit analysis confirms that large, infrequent interventions, which characterized the later period, had a higher likelihood of success than small, frequent interventions.
Working Paper
The Evolution of Price Discovery in an Electronic Market
We study the evolution of the price discovery process in the euro-dollar and dollar-yen currency pairs over a ten-year period on the EBS platform, a global trading venue used by both manual and automated traders. We find that the importance of market orders decreases sharply over that period, owing mainly to a decline in the information share from manual trading, while the information share of market orders from algorithmic and high-frequency traders remains fairly constant. At the same time, there is a substantial, but gradual, increase in the information share of limit orders. Price ...
Discussion Paper
2nd Annual International Roles of the U.S. Dollar Conference
The U.S. dollar plays a central role in the global economy. In addition to being the most widely used currency in foreign exchange transactions, it represents the largest share in official reserves, international debt securities and loans, cross-border payments, and trade invoicing.
Working Paper
Uncovered interest parity: it works, but not for long
The failure of uncovered interest parity can be ascribed to the existence of a risk premium. The size of this risk premium may shrink to zero over sufficiently small intervals of time. In contrast, because no interest is paid on intradaily positions and interest is instead paid discretely at the point when a position is rolled over from one day to the next, the size of the interest differential remains fixed over any interval that covers the time of the discrete interest payment. This is true no matter how short that interval is. Using a large dataset of high frequency exchange rate data, we ...
Working Paper
What can the data tell us about carry trades in Japanese yen?
This paper examines the available data that may shed light on the carry trade in Japanese yen. We define an individual or a sector to be engaged in the carry trade if it has a short position in yen and a long position in other currencies. The tendency of large yen movements to be skewed toward appreciations is consistent with the existence of substantial carry positions, and other evidence from market prices provides some modest support for an effect from the carry trade. Data on bank loans and bond holdings by currency reveal a large apparent yen carry position of the Japanese official ...
Working Paper
Frequency of observation and the estimation of integrated volatility in deep and liquid financial markets
Using two newly available ultrahigh-frequency datasets, we investigate empirically how frequently one can sample certain foreign exchange and U.S. Treasury security returns without contaminating estimates of their integrated volatility with market microstructure noise. Using volatility signature plots and a recently-proposed formal decision rule to select the sampling frequency, we find that one can sample FX returns as frequently as once every 15 to 20 seconds without contaminating volatility estimates; bond returns may be sampled as frequently as once every 2 to 3 minutes on days without ...
Working Paper
What drives volatility persistence in the foreign exchange market?
We analyze the factors driving the widely-noted persistence in asset return volatility using a unique dataset on global euro-dollar exchange rate trading. We propose a new simple empirical specification of volatility, based on the Kyle-model, which links volatility to the information flow, measured as the order flow in the market, and the price sensitivity to that information. Through the use of high-frequency data, we are able to estimate the time-varying market sensitivity to information, and movements in volatility can therefore be directly related to movements in two observable variables, ...
Working Paper
Trading activity and exchange rates in high-frequency EBS data
The absence of data has, until now, precluded virtually all research on trading volume in the foreign exchange market. This paper introduces a new high-frequency foreign exchange dataset from EBS (Electronic Broking Service) that includes trading volume in the global interdealer spot market. The dataset gives volumes and prices at the one-minute frequency over a five-year time period in the euro-dollar and dollar-yen currency pairs. We first document intraday volume patterns in euro-dollar and dollar-yen trading, noting the effects of macroeconomic news announcements but also purely ...
Working Paper
An assessment of the impact of Japanese foreign exchange intervention: 1991-2004
We analyze the short-term price impact of Japanese foreign exchange intervention operations between 1991 and 2004, using official data from Japan's Ministry of Finance. Over the period as a whole, we find some evidence of a modest "against the wind" effect, but interventions do not have value as a forecast that the exchange rate will move in a direction consistent with the operations. Interventions conducted between 1995 and 2002, which were large and infrequent, met with a much higher degree of success. For the most recent episode of intervention, in 2003 and 2004, despite the record size ...
Working Paper
Order Flow and Exchange Rate Dynamics in Electronic Brokerage System Data
We analyze the association between order flow and exchange rates using a new dataset representing a majority of global interdealer transactions in the two most-traded currency pairs. The data consist of six years (1999-2004) of order flow and exchange rate data for the euro-dollar and dollar-yen currency pairs at the one-minute frequency from EBS, the electronic broking system that now dominates interdealer spot trading in these currency pairs. This long span of high-frequency data allows us to gain new insights about the joint behavior of these series. We first confirm the presence of a ...