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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
Asymmetries and state dependence: the impact of macro surprises on intraday exchange rates
The impact of news surprises on exchange rates depends in principle upon a number of factors including the state of the economy, institutional setting and nature of the expected policy response. These characteristics may lead to state-contingent asymmetric responses to news. In this paper we investigate the possible asymmetric response of intraday exchange rates (5-minute intraday JPY/USD) to macroeconomic news announcements during a very unusual period--Japan during 1999-2006 when the money market interest rate was effectively zero. We may think of this period as a "natural experiment" ...
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
Are the intraday effects of central bank intervention on exchange rate spreads asymmetric and state dependent?
This paper investigates the intraday effects of unannounced foreign exchange intervention on bid-ask exchange rate spreads using official intraday intervention data provided by the Danish central bank. Our starting point is a simple theoretical model of the bid-ask spread which we use to formulate testable hypotheses regarding how unannounced intervention purchases and intervention sales influence the market asymmetrically. To test these hypotheses we estimate weighted least squares (WLS) time-series models of the intraday bid-ask spread. Our main result is that intervention purchases and ...
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
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
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
Reserves and Risk: Evidence from China
We consider if the Chinese accumulation of reserves is associated with unintended consequences in the form of increased private sector risk taking. Using sovereign credit default swap spreads and stock index prices as indicators of risk taking, we provide evidence to suggest that as reserve holdings increase, so does the willingness of the private sector to take on more risk. This is an important finding that adds credence to the suggestion that insurance through costly reserves, to be used in the event of a crisis, may lead to private sector actions that in and of themselves make it more ...
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
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 ...