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Working Paper
Negative Interest Rate Policy and the Influence of Macroeconomic News on Yields
We consider the influence of domestic and U.S. macroeconomic news surprises on daily bond yields over the January 1999 to January 2018 period for four advanced Negative Interest Rate Policy (NIRP) economies ? Germany, Japan, Sweden and Switzerland. Our results suggest that the influence of macroeconomic news surprises is for all four countries under study during the NIRP period non-existent or noticeably weaker than during the preceding Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) period. Our results are consistent with the suggestion that NIRP is characterized by a lower bound that is no less ...
Working Paper
The Exchange Rate Effects of Macro News after the Global Financial Crisis
This paper explores whether the exchange rate effects of macro news are time- and state-dependent by analyzing and comparing the relative influence of US and Japanese macro news on the JPY/USD rate before, during, and after the Global Financial Crisis. A comprehensive set totaling 40 time-stamped US and Japanese news variables and preceding survey expectations along with 5-minute indicative JPY/USD quotes spanning the 1 January 1999 to 31 August 2016 period facilitate our analysis. Our results suggest that while US macro news are now more important than before the Crisis, the influence of ...
Working Paper
Foreign exchange intervention when interest rates are zero: does the portfolio balance channel matter after all?
The Japanese zero-interest rate period provides a "natural experiment" for investigating the effectiveness and transmission channels of sterilized intervention when traditional monetary policy options are constrained. This paper takes advantage of the fact that all interventions in the JPY/USD market during the zero-interest rate period are sterilized sales of JPY and, therefore, none of these interventions can signal a future interest rate decrease. In order to further assess through which transmission channel these interventions work, the analysis integrates official daily Japanese ...
Working Paper
Effectiveness of official daily foreign exchange market intervention operations in Japan
Japanese official intervention in the foreign exchange market is of by far the largest magnitude in the world, despite little or no evidence that it is effective in moving exchange rates. Up until recently, however, official data on intervention has not been available for Japan. This paper investigates the effectiveness of intervention using recently published official daily data and an event study methodology. The event study better fits the stochastic properties of intervention and exchange rate data, i.e. intense and sporadic bursts of intervention activity juxtaposed against a yen/dollar ...
Working Paper
Intra-safe haven currency behavior during the global financial crisis
We investigate intra-safe haven currency behavior during the recent global financial crisis. The currencies we consider are the USD, the JPY, the CHF, the EUR, the GBP, the SEK, and the CAD. We first assess which safe haven currency appreciates the most as market uncertainty increases, i.e. we assess which safe haven currency is the ?safest?. We then use non-temporal threshold analysis to investigate whether intra-safe haven currency behavior changes, e.g. accelerates or decelerates, as market uncertainty increases. We find that the JPY is the ?safest? of safe haven currencies and that only ...
Working Paper
Do oil endowment and productivity matter for accumulation of international reserves?
We develop a dynamic stochastic optimization model with oil price shocks to show that countries with certain combinations of oil endowment and productivity have strong precautionary incentives to accumulate foreign reserves in response to oil price shocks. Using the Simulated Method of Moments to estimate the model we demonstrate how oil price shocks are absorbed by changes in foreign reserves which, in turn, leads to less variation in aggregate consumption. Along with productivity and oil endowment, we also consider as determinants of reserves holding conventional variables such as trade- ...
Working Paper
Is the Renminbi a safe haven?
We investigate the relationship between market uncertainty and the relative value of the Renminbi against currencies that the safe haven literature typically considers as the traditional safe haven currency candidates. Our sample spans the February 2011 to April 2016 period. Band spectral regression models enable us to capture that the relationship between market uncertainty and the relative value of the Renminbi is frequency dependent. While we find evidence of some degree of safe haven currency behavior of the Renminbi during the early part of our sample, our findings do not support the ...
Working Paper
Does foreign exchange intervention volume matter?
We investigate whether foreign exchange intervention volume matters for the exchange rate effects of intervention. Our investigation employs daily data on Japanese interventions from April 1991 to April 2012 and time-series estimations, nontemporal threshold analysis, as well as binary choice models. We find that intervention volume matters for the effects of intervention, but only to the extent that the exchange rate effect per intervention unit is magnified in a linear sense by the larger intervention amount. This is a policy-relevant finding that also adds to our understanding of how ...
Working Paper
Does foreign exchange reserve decumulation lead to currency appreciation?
Many developing countries have increased their foreign reserve stocks dramatically in recent years, often motivated by the desire for precautionary self-insurance. One of the negative consequences of large accumulations for these countries is the risk of valuation losses. In this paper we examine the implications of systematic reserve decumulation by the Czech authorities aimed at mitigating valuation losses on euro-denominated assets. The policy was explicitly not intended to influence the value of the koruna relative to the euro. Initially the timing and size of reserve sales was not ...
Working Paper
Beggar thy neighbor or beggar thy domestic firms? evidence from 2000-2011 Chinese customs data
The premise of beggar-thy-neighbor policies and currency wars is that currency depreciations lead to export growth. This premise, however, is far from validated as the existing economic literature largely either fails to find significant trade flow effects of currency fluctuations or finds that these effects are only minor. We revisit the question of whether currency fluctuations are systematically associated with trade flows using rich and unique firm level Chinese customs data on China-US trade over the 2000 to 2011 period that allows us to consider firm involvement in processing trade and ...