Search Results
Journal Article
Foreign exchange operations and the Federal Reserve
Journal Article
Summary measures of the dollar's foreign exchange value
Journal Article
How economic news moves markets
Exploring how the release of new economic data affects asset prices in the stock, bond, and foreign exchange markets, the authors find that only a few announcements - the nonfarm payroll numbers, the GDP advance release, and a private sector manufacturing report - generate price responses that are economically significant and measurably persistent. Bond yields show the strongest response and stock prices the weakest. The authors' analysis of the direction of these effects suggests that news of stronger-than-expected growth and inflation generally prompts a rise in bond yields and the exchange ...
Report
Expectations and contagion in self-fulfilling currency attacks
This paper presents a model in which currency crises can spread across countries as a result of the self-fulfilling beliefs of market participants. An incomplete-information approach is used to overcome many undesirable features of existing multiple-equilibrium explanations of contagion. If speculators expect contagion across markets to occur, they have an incentive to trade in both currency markets to take advantage of this correlation. These actions, in turn, link the two markets in such a way that a sharp devaluation of one currency will be propagated to the other market, fulfilling the ...
Discussion Paper
Financial Intermediaries and Pressures on International Capital Flows
Global factors, like monetary policy rates from advanced economies and risk conditions, drive fluctuations in volumes of international capital flows and put pressure on exchange rates. The components of international capital flows that are described as global liquidity—consisting of cross-border bank lending and financing of issuance of international debt securities—have sensitivities to risk conditions that have evolved considerably over time. This risk sensitivity has been driven, in part, by the composition and business models of the financial institutions involved in funding. In this ...
Journal Article
Exchange rate policy and the dual role of exchange rate movements in international adjustment
An abstract for this article is not available
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
Empirical research on sovereign debt and default
The long history of sovereign debt and the associated enforcement problem have attracted researchers in many fields. In this paper, we survey empirical work by economists, historians, and political scientists. As we review the empirical literature, we emphasize parallel developments in the theory of sovereign debt. One major theme emerges. Although recent research has sought to balance theoretical and empirical considerations, there remains a gap between theories of sovereign debt and the data used to test them. We recommend a number of steps that researchers can take to improve the ...
Working Paper
On the evolution of U.S. foreign-exchange-market intervention: thesis, theory, and institutions
Attitudes about foreign-exchange-market intervention in the United States evolved in tandem with views about monetary policy as policy makers grappled with the perennial problem of having more economic objectives than independent instruments with which to achieve them. This paper?the introductory chapter to our history of U.S. foreign exchange market intervention?explains this thesis and summarizes our conclusion: The Federal Reserve abandoned frequent foreign-exchange-market intervention because, rather than providing a solution to the instruments-versus-objectives problem, it interfered ...
Working Paper
Epilogue: foreign-exchange-market operations in the twenty-first century
Foreign-exchange operations did not end after the United States stopped its activist approach to intervention. Japan persisted in such operations, but avoided overt confl ict with its monetary policy. With the onset of the Great Recession, Switzerland has transacted in foreign exchange both for monetary and exchange rate purposes, and key central banks have used swap facilities to extended their lender-of-last-resort functions. Developing and emerging-market economies continue to intervene, but their actions may hamper the development of their own foreign-exchange markets. China?s undervalued ...