Intraday movements in the yen/dollar rate are examined over the 1980-86 period using opening and closing quotes in the New York and Tokyo markets. The results indicate that random-walk behavior is violated about half of the time in various subsamples. However, the economic significance of departures from the random-walk model diminishes over time. Large jumps in the exchange rate also are examined, and some evidence on subsequent mean reversion is presented. Finally, the response of Japanese and U.S. stock prices suggests that intraday yen/dollar rate movements do contain at least some relevant information.
The yen is an important barometer for the Japanese economy. Depreciations are typically associated with favorable economic developments such as increased corporate profits, rising equity prices, and upward pressure on domestic consumer prices. On the other hand, large and sharp appreciations run the risk of lowering actual and expected inflation, squeezing corporate profits, generating a negative wealth effect through depressed equity prices, and reducing confidence in the Bank of Japan’s efforts to reflate the domestic economy and achieve the inflation target. This paper takes a closer look at underlying drivers of rapid yen appreciations, highlighting the key role of carry-trade and the zero lower bound as important amplifiers.
The foreign exchange market is the largest, fastest-growing financial market in the world. Yet conventional macroeconomic approaches do not explain why people trade foreign exchange. At the same time, they fail to explain the short-run determinants of the exchange rate. These nine innovative essays use a microstructure approach to analyze the workings of the foreign exchange market, with special emphasis on institutional aspects and the actual behavior of market participants. They examine the volume of transactions, heterogeneity of traders, the time of day and location of trading, the bid-ask spread, and the high level of exchange rate volatility that has puzzled many observers. They also consider the structure of the market, including such issues as nontransparency, asymmetric information, liquidity trading, the use of automated brokers, the relationship between spot and derivative markets, and the importance of systemic risk in the market. This timely volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in the economics of international finance.
The imbalanced, yet mutually beneficial, trading relationship between the United States and Asia has long been one of international finance’s most perplexing mysteries. Although the United States continues to post a substantial trade deficit—and China reaps the benefits of a surplus—the dollar has yet to sink in the face of ever-increasing account disparities. International Financial Issues in the Pacific Rim explains why the United States enjoys a seemingly symbiotic relationship with its trading partners despite stark inequities in the trade balance, especially with Asia. This timely and well-informed study also debunks the assumed link between economic openness and low inflation in the region, identifies the serious gap between academic and private-sector researchers’ understanding of exchange rate volatility, and analyzes the liberalization of Asian capital accounts. International Financial Issues in the Pacific Rim will have broad implications for global trade and economic policy issues in Asia and beyond.
This book will be an important addition to the limited number of books that discuss finance and accounting issues in East Asian countries. While presenting recent empirical studies on finance and accounting in East Asian economies, it also reveals the underlying reasons for remarkable economic growth and emerging performance of the financial markets in the East Asian countries. It introduces newly developed financial products, institutions, governance mechanism, banking policy changes and their implications in the East Asian economies, and discusses the way forward for these economies with recommendations for policy implications. It also contains suggestions for other developing countries trying to achieve rapid growth.
Still after more than thirty years of free floating exchange rates, large parts of exchange rate dynamics remain a puzzle. As this book shows, much progress has been made in explaining exchange rate movements over longer horizons. It also shows, however, that short-run movements are far more challenging to explain. The book is based upon a variety of papers, many of them released recently. A key aspiration of the literature has always been not only to explain past exchange rate behavior but also to forecast out of sample and to compare it to the simple random walk outcome. Here some development has been made after Meese and Rogoff's (1983) truculent verdict of the performance of common exchange rate models. By means of empirical analysis and descriptive statistics this book further supports the established long-run relationships between exchange rates and fundamentals such as expected productivity growth, real GDP growth, domestic investment, interest rates, inflation, government spending, and current account balances. It finds that these fundamentals affect the exchange rate to varying degrees over time. Turning to short-term exchange rate dynamics, it turns out that a different set of forces is at play. The key to explaining short-run movements is to be found in an extensive micro-foundation that factors in a pronounced heterogeneity among market participants and information asymmetries, as well as the possibility of sudden shifts in sentiment, beliefs, and the degree of risk aversion. Promising results have been obtained by order-flow analysis and high frequency data. Also, the consideration of chartism and speculators facilitates understanding for otherwise puzzling exchange rate movements. The last attempt to tackle the understanding of exchange rate behavior is the use of frequency domain analysis and in particular spectral analysis which tries to track down any cyclical patterns in the various moments of time series. And as we shall see forex indeed incorpor
In the last few decades exchange rate economics has seen a number of developments, with substantial contributions to both the theory and empirics of exchange rate determination. Important developments in econometrics and the increasingly large availability of high-quality data have also been responsible for stimulating the large amount of empirical work on exchange rates in this period. Nonetheless, while our understanding of exchange rates has significantly improved, a number of challenges and open questions remain in the exchange rate debate, enhanced by events including the launch of the Euro and the large number of recent currency crises. This volume provides a selective coverage of the literature on exchange rates, focusing on developments from within the last fifteen years. Clear explanations of theories are offered, alongside an appraisal of the literature and suggestions for further research and analysis.
