is there private information in the fx market the tokyo experiment it is a common view that private information in the foreign exchange market does not exist we provide evidence against this view the evidence comes from the introduction of trading in tokyo over the lunch hour lunch re turn variance doubles with the introduction of trading which cannot be due to public information since the flow of public information did not change with the trading rules having eliminated public information as the cause we exploit the volatility pattern over the whole day to discriminate between the two alternatives private information and pricing errors three key re sults support the predictions of private information models first the vola tility u shape flattens greater revelation over lunch leaves a smaller share for the morning and afternoon second the u shape tilts upward an impli cation of information whose private value is transitory finally the morning exhibits a clear u shape when tokyo closes over lunch and it disappears when trading is introduced

fixing exchange rates a virtual quest for fundamentals abstract fixed exchange rates are less volatile than floating rates but the volatility of macroeconomic variables such as money and output does not change very much across exchange rate regimes this suggests that exchange rate models based only on macroeconomic fundamentals are unlikely to be very successful it also suggests that there is no clear tradeoff between reduced exchange rate volatility and macroeconomic stability

limited commitment and the demand for money understanding money demand is important for our comprehension of macroeconomics and monetary policy its instability has made this a challenge common explications for the instability are financial regulations and financial innovations that shift the money demand function we provide a complementary view by showing that a model where borrowers have limited commitment can significantly improve the fit between the theoretical money demand function and the data limited commitment can also explain why the ratio of credit to m1 is currently so low despite that nominal interest rates are at their lowest recorded levels this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

heterogeneous information arrivals and return volatility dynamics uncovering the long run in high frequency returns recent empirical evidence suggests that the interdaily volatility clustering for most speculative returns are best characterized by a slowly mean reverting fractionally integrated process meanwhile much shorter lived volatility dynamics are typically observed with high frequency intradaily returns the present article demonstrates that by interpreting the volatility as a mixture of numerous heterogeneous short run information arrivals the observed volatility process may exhibit long run dependence as such the long memory characteristics constitute an intrinsic feature of the return generating process rather than the manifestation of occasional structural shifts these ideas are confirmed by our analysis of a one year time series of fiveminute deutschemark u s dollar exchange rates among the most puzzling issues is the behavior of volatility while the general properties of volatility remain elusive perhaps the most intriguing feature revealed by empirical work on volatility is its long persistence such behavior has sparked a search almost akin to that for the holy grail for the perfect garch model but the underlying question of why such volatility persistence endures remains unanswered we conjecture that the ability to analyze higher frequency data may be particularly useful in pursuing this issue goodhart and o hara 1997 the pronounced volatility clustering is arguably one of the most striking features of financial price series recorded at daily or weekly intervals and a large body of literature seeking to characterize this aspect of speculative returns has emerged over the past decade 1 at the same time convincing theoretical explanations for the underlying sources of long run persistence in volatility remain elusive the recent advent of comprehensive high frequency andersen is from the j l kellogg graduate school of management of northwestern university bollerslev is from the university of virginia and is a research associate at the national bureau of economic research we gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by a research grant from the institute for quantitative research in finance the q group special thanks are due to olsen and associates for making the intradaily exchange rate quotes and reuter s news tape available we have received valuable comments from wake epps clive w j granger stephen f gray j huston mcculloch as well as seminar participants at the december 1996 triangle econometrics workshop the 1997 afa meetings in new orleans academia sinica the wharton school usc and georgetown and york universities we remain fully responsible for the content 1 see bollerslev chou and kroner 1992 for a survey of this literature using arch type

money demand in japan and nonlinear cointegration we estimate the long run japanese money demand function in a cointegration framework with two nonlinear functional forms that allow for the liquidity trap and compare the results with the standard log level functional form in addition to the conventional linear cointegration techniques we also use a recently developed procedure for nonlinear cointegration that allows the estimation of alternative functional forms under the same assumption regarding the trend properties of the nominal interest rate the nonlinear functional forms outperform the log level functional form based on out of sample prediction performance

does the bund dominate price discovery in euro bond futures examining information shares abstract this paper examines the relative information shares of the bund i e the 10 year euro bond future contract on german sovereign debt versus two futures with shorter maturity we find that the bund is most important but does not dominate price discovery the other contracts also have relevant and at many days even higher information shares in examining determinants of information shares we add order flow measures to market state variables and macroeconomic news more order flow in a contract consistently increases this contract s information share

second mover disadvantages in a three player stackelberg game with private information abstract i consider a three player stackelberg game where each player has its private signal concerning stochastic demand i show that at a perfectly revealing equilibrium the second mover earns the lowest and the third mover the highest expected profit of the three i characterize this result by the strategic substitutes or complements relationships among three firms at the equilibrium journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d82 and l13

inflation and welfare in a monetary economy it is in everyone s private interest to try to get someone else to hold non interest bearing cash and reserves but someone has to hold it all so these efforts must simply cancel out all of us spend several hours per year in this effort and employ thousands of talented and highly trained people to help us these person hours are simply thrown away wasted on a task that should not have to be performed at all

frequency domain analysis of foreign exchange order flows abstract using a unique data set from the bank of canada this paper presents the frequency domain analysis of a causal relationship between the canada us dollar exchange rate movements and currency order flows the evidence shows that the existence as well as the direction of causality depends on the customer type frequency and time period

tests for parameter instability in regressions with i 1 processes this article derives the large sample distributions of lagrange multiplier lm tests for parameter instability against several alternatives of interest in the context of cointegrated regression models the fully modified estimator of phillips and hansen is extended to cover general models with stochastic and deterministic trends the test statistics considered include the supf test of quandt as well as the lm tests of nyblom and of nabeya and tanaka it is found that the asymptotic distributions depend on the nature of the regressor processes that is if the regressors are stochastic or deterministic trends the distributions are noticeably different from the distributions when the data are weakly dependent it is also found that the lack of cointegration is a special case of the alternative hypothesis considered an unstable intercept so the tests proposed here may also be viewed as a test of the null of cointegration against the alternative of no cointegration the tests are applied to three data se

order flows and the exchange rate disconnect puzzle abstract the aim of this paper is to establish the link between the high frequency dynamics of spot exchange rates and developments in the macroeconomy to do so i first present a theoretical model of exchange rate determination that bridges the gap between existing microstructure and traditional models the model examines how dispersed microeconomic information known to individual agents outside the foreign exchange market is aggregated and transmitted to dealers via transaction flows i e order flow and how the information is then embedded in the spot exchange rate i then report empirical evidence that strongly supports the presence of the link between the macroeconomy order flow and high frequency exchange rate returns implied by the model in fact my empirical results indicate that between 20 and 30 of the variance in excess currency returns over one and two month horizons can be linked back to developments in the macroeconomy this level of explanatory power is an order of magnitude higher than that found in traditional models even the newly developed monetary models incorporating central banks reaction functions moreover it provides a straightforward solution to the exchange rate disconnect puzzle namely the high frequency behavior of spot exchange rates reflects the flow of new information reaching dealers concerning the slowly evolving state of the macroeconomy rather than the effects of shocks that drive rapidly changing macroeconomic conditions

small firms borrowing constraints and reputation abstract this paper presents a simple model relating firm age with firm size and access to credit markets lending to new firms is risky because lenders have had no time to accumulate observations about them as a result interest rates are high and loans are small for entering firms as firms need credit to operate credit markets impose a limit on the scale of operation of new firms reputation building by the firms allows markets to overcome these difficulties over time large firms face lower interest rates than small firms and credit market fluctuations are shown to have different effects on firms of different size

the influence of fundamentals on exchange rates findings from analyses of news effects as we survey the literature of macroeconomic news in the foreign exchange market we can by now look back on nearly 30 years of research the first studies which analysed news effects on exchange rates were established in the early 1990s see for example dornbusch almost at the same time meese and rogoff published their influential paper revealing the forecasting inferiority in exchange rates of structural models against the random walk this finding has shocked the pillars of exchange rate economics and thus cast general suspicion on research focusing on fundamentals in this field the eventual rising popularity of event studies can partly be attributed to the re establishment of the raison d etre of exchange rate economics this work focuses on systematically surveying this literature with particular respect to its primary goal i e shedding light on the analytical value of fundamental research thus its major findings are first fundamental news does matter whereas non fundamental news matters to a lesser degree second news influences exchange rates via two separated channels i e incorporating common information into prices directly or indirectly based upon order flow third with a few exceptions the impact of fundamental news on exchange rates is fairly stable over time

the effects of macroeconomic news on high frequency exchange rate behavior this paper studies the high frequency reaction of the dem usd exchange rate to publicly announced macroeconomic information emanating from germany and the u s by us ing data sampled at a five minute frequency we are able to identify significant impacts of most announcements on the exchange rate change in the 15 minutes post announcement although the significance of these effects decreases rapidly as the interval over which the post announcement change in exchange rates is increased the direction of the exchange rate response conforms in general with a reaction function interpretation whereby reac tions to macroeconomic news are driven by the likely operations of monetary authorities in domestic money markets further we detect influences of german monetary policy deci sions on the reaction of the exchange rate and also differences between u s and german announcements in the exchange rate reaction time pattern i introduction this paper studies the high frequency reaction of the dem usd exchange rate to macroeconomic information emanating from germany and the u s specif ically we utilize exchange rate data covering the period 1 1 92 to 31 12 94 sam pled at a five minute frequency to investigate how the major monthly macroe conomic releases from these two countries impact the dem usd the infor mation contained in announcements over this three year period is extracted via a set of market expectation series supplied by money market services interna tional mms 1 our analysis improves on previous work in this area in two main respects first our study is conducted using very high frequency data whereas most earlier work has used exchange rate data sampled at a frequency of a number of hours or more this allows us to construct a very precise characterization of

less of a puzzle a new look at the forward forex market abstract the two country monetary model is extended to include a consumption externality with habit persistence the model is simulated using the artificial economy methodology the puzzles in the forward market are re examined the model is able to account for a the low volatility of the forward discount b the higher volatility of expected forward speculative profit c the even higher volatility of the spot return d the persistence in the forward discount e the martingale behavior of spot exchange rates and f the negative covariance between the expected spot return and expected forward speculative profit it is unable to account for the forward market bias because the volatility of the expected spot return is too large relative to the volatility of the expected forward speculative profit

the impact of european central bank governing council announcements on the foreign exchange market a microstructural analysis abstract we examine the evidence regarding systematic patterns in the euro dollar foreign exchange market on days when the governing council gc of the european central bank announces its interest rate decisions versus other days we examine 5 minute data in a non linear framework allowing for switching between a high volatility informed trading state and a low volatility liquidity trading state we find strong evidence that the gc policy announcements contain significant news content although there is some evidence of positioning in the hour prior to the announcement this probably reflects dealers minimizing their exposure rather than evidence of information leakage

reputation and imperfect information abstract a common observation in the informal literature of economics and elsewhere is that is multistage games players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being tough or benevolent or something else but this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game theoretic analyses of finite games such as selten s finitely repeated chain store game or in the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma we reexamine selten s model adding to it a small amount of imperfect or incomplete information about players payoffs and we find that this addition is sufficient to give rise to the reputation effect that one intuitively expects

keynesian government spending multipliers and spillovers in the euro area the global financial crisis has led to a renewed interest in discretionary fiscal stimulus advocates of discretionary measures emphasize that government spending can stimulate additional private spending the keynesian multiplier effect thus we investigate whether the spending package announced by euro area governments for 2009 and 2010 is likely to boost gdp by more than one for one because of modelling uncertainty it is essential that such policy evaluations be robust to alternative modelling assumptions and parameterizations we use five different empirical macroeconomic models with keynesian features such as price and wage rigidities to evaluate the impact of the fiscal stimulus four of them suggest that the planned increase in government spending will reduce private consumption and investment significantly only a model that largely ignores the forward looking behavioural response of consumers and firms implies crowding in of private spending we review a range of issues that may play a role in the recession of 2008 2009 implementation lags are found to reinforce crowding out and may even cause an initial contraction zero bound effects may lead the central bank to abstain from interest rate hikes and increase the gdp impact of government spending crowding in however requires an immediate anticipation of at least two years at the zero bound using a multi country model we find that spillovers between euro area countries are negligible or even negative because direct demand effects are offset by the indirect effect of a euro appreciation new keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge models provide a strong case for government savings packages announced with sufficient lead time spending cuts induce a significant short run stimulus and crowding in of private spending tobias cwik and volker wieland

commercially available order flow data and exchange rate movements caveat emptor research suggests that customer order flow should help predict exchange rates we make two contributions first we provide a review of the recent literature on order flow and exchange rate movements second we critically evaluate the practical value of customer order flow data that are commercially available to the wider market as well as the forecasting properties of inter dealer order flow in line with microstructure theory we find little evidence that the latter can forecast exchange rates but our results also cast considerable doubt on the practical value to market practitioners of commercially available customer order flow data

dynamic relations between international equity and currency markets the role of currency order flow previous research on the dynamic linkages between international financial markets focused on bivariate interequity or intercurrency relationships and do not allow a specific role for the currency or equity market respectively in this paper we hypothesize that there are important yet not well understood dynamic relationships between international equity and currency markets and these are driven by information spillover via the mechanism of currency order flow using a trivariate asymmetric garch framework we find that the relationships between equity and currency markets are significant bidirectional and pervasive these relationships which coexist with the relationships between u s and foreign equity markets are much stronger in the volatilities than in the means importantly we find strong support for our information spillover hypothesis where currency order flow is the economic mechanism by which information is transmitted

what defines news in foreign exchange markets abstract this paper examines whether the traditional sets of macro surprises that most of the literature considers are the only sorts of news that can explain exchange rate movements we examine the intra daily influence of a broad set of news reports including variables which are not typically considered fundamentals in the context of standard models of exchange rate determination and ask whether they too help predict exchange rate behavior we also examine whether news not only impacts exchange rates directly but also influences exchange rates via order flow signed trade volume our results indicate that along with the standard fundamentals both non fundamental news and order flow matter suggesting that future models of exchange rate determination ought to include all three types of explanatory variables

the microstructure of exchange rate management fx intervention and capital controls in brazil this article uses a microstructure approach to analyse the effectiveness of capital controls introduced in brazil to counter an appreciation of the real based on a rich data set from the brazilian foreign exchange market we estimate a reduced form var to characterize the interaction of the central bank financial and commercial customers in times of regulatory policy measures we find that capital controls change market participants behaviour and that central bank interventions elicit a significant response in financial order flow referring to the source of order flow we find no direct price impact by financial flows and thus no evidence that the appreciation of the real is driven by financial customers activity instead commercial customers seem to be a primary driver of the real within our model

extreme returns the case of currencies abstract financial market crashes can occur even in the absence of news this paper highlights four properties of price contingent trading that increase the frequency of such events price contingent trading is common across financial market since it includes algorithmic trading technical trading and dynamic option hedging the four properties we consider are 1 high kurtosis in the distribution of order sizes 2 clustering of trades within the day 3 clustering of trades at certain prices and 4 feedback between trading and returns the paper estimates the relative importance of these factors using data from the foreign exchange market calibrated simulations indicate that interactions among these factors are at least as important as any single one among individual factors the orders size distribution and feedback effects have the strongest influence overall price contingent trading could account for half of realized excess kurtosis the paper suggests that extreme returns unaccompanied by news are statistically inevitable in the presence of price contingent trading

foreign exchange markets overview of the special issue introduction by way of abstract two decades ago exchange rate economics seemed to be in total shambles that however did not last long science proceeds by successive approximations and in the intervening years the foreign exchange market became one of the most heavily researched areas in economics the first wave of findings to come out of this new research concerned the centuries old theoretical construct of purchasing power parity and relatedly the behavior of real exchange rates here the consensus gradually shifted from the widespread view that ppp had collapsed to the view that it was in fact a useful empirical first empirical approximation in the long run as lothian and taylor 1996 put it in an introduction to the jimf conference issue on exchange rate modeling published in 1998 one of us wrote koedijk 1998 1 ten years of data and estimation techniques later the outlook is less bleak at least in the medium run a predictable relationship between exchange rates and economic fundamentals has re emerged and reintroduced tempered optimism in exchange rate economics

integration cointegration and the forecast consistency of structural exchange rate models abstract we propose an alternative set of criteria for evaluating forecast rationality the forecast and the actual series 1 have the same order of integration 2 are cointegrated and 3 have a cointegrating vector consistent with long run unitary elasticity of expectations we denote forecasts that meet these criteria as consistent forecasts generated from monetary models generally pass 1 however using the johansen procedure cointegration fails to hold the longer the horizon of the cointegrated pairs 3 is not generally rejected using the horvath watson procedure imposing the unitary coefficient restriction we find fewer instances of consistency although a higher proportion of the cases of consistency are found at the longer horizons

fx trading and exchange rate dynamics i examine the sources of exchange rate dynamics by focusing on the information structure of fx trading this structure permits the existence of an equilibrium distribution of transaction prices at a point in time i develop and estimate a model of the price distribution using data from the deutsche mark dollar market that prroduces two striking results 1 much of the short term volatility in exchange rates comes from sampling the heterogeneous trading decisions of dealers in a distribution that under normal market conditions changes comparatively slowly 2 public news is rarely the predominant source of exchange rate movements over any horizon copyright the american finance association 2002

news from the u s and japan which moves the yen dollar exchange rate abstract intra daily movements in the yen dollar exchange rate are examined in four non overlapping segments within each business day from january 1980 to september 1985 the results indicate that the dollar tended to appreciate in the new york segment and depreciate in the european segment in three of the four subsamples considered the tokyo segment made virtually no contribution to annual yen dollar rate movements the volatility of the exchange rate also differed across markets finally in examining the relative effects of news from the u s and japan explicitly u s money announcement surprises had the most consistent effects

testing long horizon predictive ability with high persistence and the meese rogoff puzzle a well known puzzle in the international finance literature is that a random walk predicts exchange rates better than economic models meese and rogoff 1983a b and 1988 this paper offers a potential explanation for this finding when exchange rates and fundamentals are highly persistent long horizon forecasts of economic models are asymptotically biased by the estimation error in the parameter that measures the persistence when this bias outweighs the benefits from exploiting economic information the random walk model will forecast better this happens even if the economic model is the true data generating process the reason is that a random walk model imposes a unit root rather than estimates it the paper thus proposes a test for equal predictive ability in the presence of highly persistent variables when applied to the meese rogoff exercise this test shows that the poor forecasting ability of economic models does not imply that the models are not a good description of the data

the short run dynamics of the price adjustment to new information we examine how prices in interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets adjust to the new information contained in scheduled macroeconomic news releases in the very short run using 10 second returns and tick by tick data we find that prices adjust in a series of numerous small but rapid price changes that begin within 10 seconds of the news release and are basically completed within 40 seconds of the release there is some evidence that prices overreact in the first 40 seconds but that this is corrected in the second or third minute after the release while volatility tends to be higher than normal just before the news release there is no evidence of information leakage in our analysis we correct for the biases created by bid ask spreads and tick by tick data

deutsche mark dollar volatility intraday activity patterns macroeconomic announcements and longer run dependencies this paper provides a detailed characterization of the volatility in the deutsche mark dollar foreign exchange market using an annual sample of five minute returns the approach captures the intraday activity patterns the macroeconomic announcements and the volatility persistence arch known from daily returns the different features are separately quantified and shown to account for a substantial fraction of return variability both at the intraday and daily level the implications of the results for the interpretation of the fundamental driving forces behind the volatility process is also discussed the efficient market hypothesis contends that financial asset prices provide rational assessments of fundamental values and future payoffs by implication price changes should reflect the arrival and processing of all relevant new information however the proportion of return variability that can be ascribed to public news announcements is low for example cutler poterba and summers 1989 find that even the largest daily price changes in the stock market generally cannot be associated with any significant economic news 1 moreover proxies for the flow of public information e g the number of news items released by reuter s news service berry and hiowe 1994 or dow jones company mitchell and mulherin 1994 explain little of the overall variation thus if private information is ruled out proponents of rational price formation have to assert the existence of important news items

money demand and the effects of fiscal policies this paper reexamines the choice of the scale variable in the money demand function a variety of evidence suggests that consumer spending is a better scale variable than gnp changing the money demand specification along these lines can profoundly affect the standard keynesian analysis of a tax cut copyright 1986 by ohio state university press

exchange rates and fundamentals new evidence from real time data abstract this paper analyses the link between economic fundamentals and exchange rates by investigating the importance of real time data we find that economic news in the united states germany and the euro area have been a driving force behind daily us dollar euro dem exchange rate developments in the period 1993 2003 the larger importance of us macroeconomic news is at least partly explained by their earlier release time compared to corresponding german and euro area news the exchange rate is also shown to respond more strongly to news in periods of large market uncertainty and when negative or large shocks occur overall the model based on real time data explains about 75 of the monthly directional changes of the us dollar euro exchange rate although it does not explain well the magnitude of the exchange rate changes

money financed fiscal stimulus the effects of implementation lag abstract previous studies argue that based on the new keynesian framework a fiscal stimulus financed by money creation has a strong positive effect on output under a reasonable degree of nominal price rigidities this paper investigates the effects of an implementation lag in a money financed fiscal stimulus on output we show that if a money financed government purchase has a time lag between the decision and the implementation 1 it may cause a recession rather than a boom when the economy is in normal times 2 it may deepen a recession when the economy is in a liquidity trap 3 the longer the implementation lag the deeper the recession and 4 the depth of the recession depends on the interest semi elasticity of money demand our results imply that if money demand is unstable the money financed fiscal stimulus with an implementation lag may have unstable effects on output in contrast to the debt financed fiscal stimulus

informational integration and fx trading abstract this paper addresses international financial integration in a new way we focus on informational integration specifically the importance of information conveyed by order flow in major currencies for pricing minor currencies we develop a multi currency model of portfolio allocation in the presence of dispersed information we then test the model s implications using four months of concurrent transaction data on nine currencies the model explains 45 to 78 of daily returns in all nine currencies moreover its prediction that order flow in individual markets should be relevant for determining prices in other markets is borne out

shock effects on stocks bonds and exchange rates abstract tick data and newswire searches are used to find events that led to large and rapid price changes in a stock future a bond future and three exchange rate futures knowledge of these events may be useful in future work they have the advantages that they are truly surprises and that the sign of their effect on each financial instrument is known the events are used in this study to analyze the effects of three types of events monetary price and real on the five instruments

talking heads the effects of ecb statements on the euro dollar exchange rate abstract this paper studies the reaction of the conditional mean and volatility of the euro dollar exchange rate to statements by european central bank and national central bank officials we focus on comments on monetary policy and the external value of the euro we find that the bundesbank has dominated the news coverage we conclude that ecb statements have mainly influenced conditional volatility in some cases there are effects of statements on the conditional mean of the euro dollar exchange rate efforts to talk up the euro have generally not been successful there is also evidence of asymmetric reactions to news

quantifying tax effects under policy foresight abstract studies of tax effects make the conventional information assumption that changes in period t taxes become known at t legislative lags however imply that news arrives before tax changes take place under policy foreknowledge the conventional information structure is therefore misspecified simulations of a standard neoclassical growth model suggest that foresight of only one quarter can distort substantially the estimates of tax effects obtained under the no foresight assumption also it is crucial to model capital and labor taxes separately anticipated changes in these two tax policies have opposite effects on consumption investment labor and output before policy realization

the euro as an international currency explaining puzzling first evidence from the foreign exchange markets this paper presents evidence that the bid ask spreads in euro rates increased relative to the corresponding bid ask spreads in the german mark dm prior to the creation of the currency union this comes with a decrease in transaction volume in the euro rates relative to the previous dm rates the starkest example is the dm euro yen rate in which the spread has risen by almost two thirds while the volume decreased by more than one third this outcome is surprising because the common currency concentrated market liquidity in fewer external euro rates and higher volume tends to be associated with lower spreads we propose a microstructure explanation based on a change in the information environment of the fx market the elimination of many cross currency pairs increased the market transparency for order flow imbalances in the dealership market it is argued that higher market transparency adversely affects the inventory risk sharing efficiency of the dealership market and induces the observed euro spread increase and transaction volume shortfall 2002 elsevier science ltd all rights reserved jel classification f31 g14 g15 d8

the intraday bid ask spread behaviour of the jpy usd exchange rate in the ebs electronic brokerage system using a sophisticated tool of the periodic generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic p garch model this article investigates the market institutional effects of the determining role of trading activities and exchange rate volatility on the intraday behaviour of the 15 minute jpy usd exchange rate bid ask spreads in the electronic broking service ebs of electronic brokerage market for the period from 1 january 2003 to 31 december 2005 we find that the exchange rate volatility both significantly and positively affects the bid ask spreads while the number of deals and quotation changes negatively affect the bid ask spreads these results are similar to those of past studies we also find that a u shaped pattern exists in the tokyo trading hours and an inverted u shaped pattern in the london trading hours in addition to a round clock inverted u shaped pattern of spread volatility this inverted u shaped pattern may be caused by unexpected news arrivals the spread behaviour of the ebs glo

once in a generation yen volatility in 1998 fundamentals intervention and order flow abstract the dramatic yen dollar volatility of 1998 has been popularly ascribed to order flow driven by changing tastes for risk and hedge fund herding on unwinding yen carry trade positions rather than fundamentals high frequency evidence of shifting fundamentals is provided by a comprehensive list of macroeconomic announcements news is found to have significant effects on volatility but order flow may play a more important role since portfolio shifts are revealed to the market through trading the results are consistent with order flow playing a significant role in the revelation of private information and associated exchange rate shifts

government investment and fiscal stimulus effects of government investment are studied in an estimated neoclassical growth model the analysis focuses on two dimensions that are critical for understanding government investment as a fiscal stimulus implementation delays for building public capital and expected fiscal adjustments to deficit financed spending implementation delays can produce small or even negative labor and output responses to increases in government investment in the short run anticipated fiscal adjustments matter both quantitatively and qualitatively for long run growth effects when public capital is insufficiently productive distorting financing can make government investment contractionary at longer horizons

on the welfare cost of inflation and the recent behavior of money demand post 1980 u s data trace out a stable long run money demand relationship of cagan s semi log form between the m1 income ratio and the nominal interest rate with an interest semi elasticity of 1 79 integrating under this money demand curve yields estimates of the welfare cost of modest departures from friedman s zero nominal interest rate rule for the optimum quantity of money that are quite small the results suggest that the federal reserve s current policy which generates low but still positive rates of inflation provides an adequate approximation in welfare terms to the alternative of moving all the way to the friedman rule jel e31 e41 e52

perfect versus imperfect observability an experimental test of bagwell s result abstract in a seminal paper bagwell 1995 games econom behav 8 271 280 claims that the first mover advantage i e the strategic benefit of committing oneself to an action before others can vanishes completely if this action is only imperfectly observed by second movers in our paper we report on an experimental test of this prediction we implement four versions of a game similar to an example given by bagwell each time varying the quality of the signal which informs the second mover for experienced players we do not find empirical support for bagwell s result journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 c92

unconventional fiscal policy at the zero bound when the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates binds monetary policy cannot provide appropriate stimulus we show that in the standard new keynesian model tax policy can deliver such stimulus at no cost and in a time consistent manner there is no need to use inecient policies such as

the effects of a money financed fiscal stimulus abstract i analyze the effects of a money financed fiscal stimulus and compare them with those resulting from a conventional debt financed stimulus i study the effects of both a tax cut and an increase in government purchases with and without a binding zero lower bound zlb on the nominal interest rate when the zlb is not binding a money financed fiscal stimulus is shown to have much larger multipliers than a debt financed fiscal stimulus that difference in effectiveness persists but is much smaller under a binding zlb nominal rigidities are shown to play a major role in shaping those effects

predation reputation and entry deterrence abstract economists often argue that predatory practices are irrational since there exist cheaper or more certain means to gain or maintain a monopoly our gametheoretic equilibrium analysis suggests that if a firm is threatened by several potential entrants then predation may be rational against early entrants even if it is costly when viewed in isolation because it yields a reputation which deters other entrants asymmetric information plays a crucial role in our analysis since it provides the rationale for entrants to base their expectations of the firm s future behavior on its past actions the analysis also suggests methods to treat general reputational phenomena

the reaction of exchange rates to economic news this paper examines the short run responses of spot exchange rates to several types of economic news survey data are used to divide economic announcements into expected and unexpected components with the latter measuring news the results indicate that exchange rates are systematically related to unexpected money announcements after the october 1979 switch in federal reserve operating procedures but not before this response does not appear to have changed however after the october 1982 federal reserve regime change short run exchange rate movements are not systematically related to news on inflation or real activity

conditioning carry trades less risk more return abstract prior studies show that extreme interest rate differentials irds and high foreign exchange rate fx volatility have substantial explanatory power for the validity of uip we show that these contemporaneous drivers also have predictive power by implementing a conditional currency carry trade ct strategy that excludes regimes for which uip is likely to hold conditioning high fx volatility only or on both fx volatility and extreme irds outperforms the base case unconditional ct strategy in virtually any of the settings analyzed conditioning on very large irds only shows mixed findings our strategy works best for smaller ct portfolios

business cycles and the exchange rate system some international evidence this paper investigates the differences in time series behavior of key economic aggregates under alternative exchange rate systems we use a postwar sample of 49 countries to compare the behavior of output consumption trade flows government consumption spending and real exchange rates under alternative exchange rate systems pegged floating and cooperative systems such as the ems we then examine evidence from two particular episodes involving canada and ireland of changes in the exchange rate system aside from greater variability of real exchange rates under flexible than under pegged nominal exchange rate systems we find little evidence of systematic differences in the behavior of macroeconomic aggregates or international trade flows under alternative exchange rate systems these results are of interest because a large class of theoretical models implies that the nominal exchange rate system has important effects on a number of macroeconomic quantities

a panel project on purchasing power parity mean reversion within and between countries abstract previous time series studies have shown evidence of mean reversion in real exchange rates deviations from purchasing power parity ppp appear to have half lives of approximately four years however the long samples required for statistical significance are unavailable for most currencies and are potentially inappropriate because of regime changes in this study we re examine deviations from ppp using a panel of 150 countries and 45 annual post wwii observations our panel shows strong evidence of mean reversion that is similar to that from long time series ppp deviations are eroded at a rate of approximately 15 annually i e their half life is around four years such findings can be masked in time series data but are relatively easy to find in cross sections

the market microstructure of central bank intervention abstract how quickly do central bank intervention operations impact the foreign exchange market and do intra daily market conditions influence the effectiveness of central bank interventions this paper uses high frequency intra daily data to examine the relationship between the efficacy of intervention operations and the state of the market at the moment that the operation is made public the results indicate that some traders typically know that the fed is intervening at least 1 h prior to the public release of the information in newswire reports also the evidence suggests that the timing of intervention operations matters interventions that occur during heavy trading volume that are closely timed to scheduled macro announcements and that are coordinated with another central bank are the most likely to have large effects

central bank intervention and exchange rate volatility abstract this paper explores the effects of foreign exchange intervention by central banks on the behavior of exchange rates the g 3 central banks have undertaken an unprecedented number of both coordinated and unilateral intervention operations in the last 10 years existing empirical evidence on the effectiveness of intervention is mixed studies using data from the 1970s suggest that intervention operations that do not affect the monetary base have at most a short lived influence on exchange rates but more recent studies indicate that the intervention operations that followed the plaza agreement influenced both the level and variance of exchange rates this paper examines the effects of us german and japanese monetary and intervention policies on dollar mark and dollar yen exchange rate volatility over the 1977 1994 period the results indicate that intervention operations generally increase exchange rate volatility this is particularly true of secret interventions which are those undertaken by central banks without notification of the public overt interventions in the mid 1980s appear to have reduced exchange rate volatility but in other periods and for the 1977 1994 period as a whole central bank intervention is associated with greater exchange rate volatility

fixed versus flexible lessons from ems order flow abstract we extend the literature on regime dependent volatility in two ways first our microstructural model provides a qualitatively new explanation second we test implications of our model using europe s recent shift to rigidly fixed rates ems to emu in the model shocks to order flow induce more volatility under flexible rates because the elasticity of speculative demand is endogenously low leading to pronounced portfolio balance effects new data on ff dm transactions show that order flow had persistent effects on the exchange rate before emu parities were announced after announcement the ff dm rate was decoupled from order flow as the model predicts

optimal monetary policy at the zero interest rate bound what should a central bank do when faced with a weak aggregate demand even after reducing the short term nominal interest rate to zero to address this question we solve a central bank s intertemporal loss minimization problem in which the non negativity constraint on nominal interest rates is explicitly considered we find that the optimal path is characterized by policy inertia in the sense that a zero interest rate policy should be continued for a while even after the natural rate of interest returns to a positive level by making such a commitment the central bank is able to achieve higher expected inflation lower long term nominal interest rates and a weaker domestic currency in the adverse periods when the natural rate of interest significantly deviates from a steady state level

on the stability of money demand abstract we show that regulatory changes that occurred in the banking sector in the early 1980s that considerably weakened regulation q can explain the apparent instability of money demand starting in the same period we evaluate the effects of the regulatory changes using a model that goes beyond aggregates as m1 and treats currency and different deposit types as alternative means of payments we use the model to construct a new monetary aggregate that performs remarkably well for all the period 1915 2012

is there a fiscal free lunch in a liquidity trap this paper uses a dsge model to examine the eects of an expansion in government spending in a liquidity trap the spending multiplier can be much larger than in the normal situation if the liquidity trap is very persistent and scal stimulus can be rapidly implemented moreover the budgetary costs may be minimal as the large response of output boosts tax revenues allowing for something close to a scal free lunch however we caution that the multiplier may be much smaller under plausible implementation lags for many types of public spending and or if the liquidity trap lasts less than two years in addition because the marginal impact of scal expansion decreases in the scale of the outlay it is crucial to distinguish between average and marginal multipliers

the effect of central bank transparency on exchange rate volatility abstract the increase in central bank transparency has been one of the main developments in central banking in the past two decades this leads to the question of the effect of central bank transparency on the volatility of exchange rates according to theoretical considerations more information could lead to either more precise forecasts or more noise trading this raises the need for an empirical estimation of the relationship the present study shows that the effect of central bank transparency on exchange rate volatility depends on a country s development while there is no effect of central bank transparency in the full sample and for developing countries transparency increases exchange rate fluctuations in developed countries

optimism invites deception recent literature has focused on reputation as a mechanism for partially correcting information asymmetries that can exist in markets where sellers produce an output whose quality is not easily observed by buyers prior to sale then sellers reputation based on past observations can be used by consumers to prejudge quality consumers may pay a premium price for such firms for whom a reputation is a valuable asset in choosing quality anew each period the prospect of future profits from this premium price may dissuade the firm from cheating on quality this theory is developed in klein and leffler 1981 shapiro 1982 1983 dybvig and spatt 1983 rogerson 1983 and allen 1984 this literature has presumed that the quality of firms chosen inputs is perfectly correlated with the quality of their outputs there is no noise in the production process indeed adding noise to a reputation model would seem to be a trivial generalization at first blush we would expect the product of a firm that delivered high quality only 90 percent of the time to be worth roughly 90 percent of the value of the product of a firm that had perfect quality control in this paper we investigate the pure strategy equilibria of a rational expectations model that incorporates quality noise we find that the market for high quality may not be sustainable in the presence of such noise ruling out mixed strategies since consumers cannot observe the quality of a firm s inputs assumed fixed and sunk they must infer this quality from observed outputs in equilibrium consumers initial beliefs about the quality of the firm s inputs are determined by what they correctly predict to be the firm s strategy observations of the output lead them to revise these beliefs in accordance with bayes law if consumers are sure that a firm will purchase good inputs then it pays the firm to cheat and purchase bad inputs since

the purchasing power parity debate originally propounded by the 16th century scholars of the university of salamanca the concept of purchasing power parity ppp was revived in the interwar period in the context of the debate concerning the appropriate level at which to re establish international exchange rate parities broadly accepted as a long run equilibrium condition in the post war period it first was advocated as a short run equilibrium by many international economists in the first few years following the breakdown of the bretton woods system in the early 1970s and then increasingly came under attack on both theoretical and empirical grounds from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s accordingly over the last three decades a large literature has built up that examines how much the data deviated from theory and the fruits of this research have provided a deeper understanding of how well ppp applies in both the short run and the long run since the mid 1990s larger datasets and nonlinear econometric methods in particular have improved estimation as deviations narrowed between real exchange rates and ppp so did the gap narrow between theory and data and some degree of confidence in long run ppp began to emerge again in this respect the idea of long run ppp now enjoys perhaps its strongest support in more than 30 years a distinct reversion in economic thought

risk premia carry trade dynamics and economic value of currency speculation in this paper we derive the dynamics and assess the economic value of currency speculation by formalizing the concept of a trader inaction range we show that exchange rate returns comprise a time varying risk premium and that uncovered interest parity uip holds in a speculative sense the often cited forward bias puzzle originates from the omission of the risk premium in standard uip tests consistent with its popularity among market professionals the carry trade strategy can be rationalized as it systematically collects risk premia and generates economic value when applied in multi currency portfolios

an investigation of customer order flow in the foreign exchange market this paper examines the effect that heterogeneous customer orders flows have on exchange rates by using a new propreitary dataset of weekly net order flow segmented by customer type across nine of the most liquid currency pairs we make three contributions first we investigate the extent to which order flow can help to explain exchange rate movements over and above the influence of macroeconomic variables second we look at the usefulness of order flow in forecasting exchange rate movements at longer horizons than those generally considered in the microstructure literature finally we address the question of whether the out of sample exchange rate forecasts generated by order flows can be employed profitably in the foreign exchange markets

on inflation and output with costly price changes a simple unifying result this paper determines the real effects of credible disinflation when price setting is staggered the results are surprising a fairly quick disinflation causes a boom this finding suggests that nominal price rigidity alone does not explain why disinflation is costly in actual economies this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

reputation and equilibrium selection in games with a patient player a single long run player plays a simultaneous move stage game against a sequence of opponents who play only once but observe all previous play let the stackelberg strategy be the pure strategy to which the long run player would most like to commit himself if there is positive prior probability that the long run player will always play the stackelberg strategy then his payoff in any nash equilibrium exceeds a bound that converges to the stackelberg payoff as his discount factor approaches one when the stage game is not simultaneous move this result must be modified to account for the possibility that distinct strategies of the long run player are observationally equivalent

local information in foreign exchange markets abstract this study shows that order flow in a foreign exchange market appears to have permanent price impact only if it comes from certain regions these regions are as predicted by the local information hypothesis centers of political and financial decision making it is revealing that orders from other regions only show a very short lived but no permanent price impact local information is so important that it carries over from the usually considered market orders to aggressively priced limit orders too the finding is robust to common news shocks to the consideration of feedback trading and to further controls

entrants reputation and industry dynamics this article analyzes entry exit decisions in a market where reputation determines the price that firms may charge within a rational expectation model of competition in a nonatomic market under heterogeneous reputations the analysis focuses on the class of name switching reputational equilibria in which a firm discards its name if and only if its reputation falls below the entrants reputation the main technical result is the existence of a unique steady state equilibrium within this class in which the entrants reputation is endogenous the resulting industry dynamics is largely on agreement with the findings in the empirical literature

a transaction level study of the effects of central bank intervention on exchange rates abstract we study the effects of sterilised intervention operations executed on behalf of the swiss national bank snb using tick by tick transactions data between 1986 and 1995 we extend the preliminary analysis of economic journal 109 1999 662 by matching these data with indicative intra day exchange rate quotes and news wire reports of central bank activity using an event study approach we find that intervention has important short run effects on exchange rate returns in particular among various results we find that i intervention has a stronger impact when the snb moves with the market and when its activity is concerted with that of other central banks and ii exchange rate returns move in the 15 min interval prior to interventions

order flows news and exchange rate volatility abstract this paper examines the roles of order flow reflecting private information and news reflecting public information in explaining exchange rate volatility analyzing four months of a bank s high frequency dollar euro trading three different kinds of order flow are used in addition to seasonal patterns in explaining volatility we find that only larger sized order flows from financial customers and banks indicating informed trading contribute to explaining volatility whereas flows from commercial customers do not the result is robust when we control for news and other measures of market activity this strengthens the view that exchange rate volatility reflects information processing

reputation with noisy precommitment abstract a long run player with private information about how long the game will last must precommit to an action and faces a sequence of short run players who get a noisy signal of that action since noise vanishes with time we might expect a long lived long run player to behave as a stackelberg leader if so short run players may end up ignoring the signal then however the long run player would have no reason to actually choose the stackelberg action we show that this paradox can be resolved if there is a chance that the long run player chooses other action by mistake and the signal is sufficiently informative journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c72 c73

money demand function estimation by nonlinear cointegration conventionally the money demand function is estimated using a regression of the logarithm of money demand on either the interest rate or the logarithm of the interest rate this equation is presumed to be a cointegrating regression in this paper we aim to combine the logarithmic specification which models the liquidity trap better than a linear model with the assumption that the interest rate itself is an integrated process the proposed technique is robust to serial correlation in the errors for the usa our new technique results in larger coefficient estimates than previous research suggested and produces superior out of sample prediction copyright 2007 john wiley sons ltd

meese rogoff redux micro based exchange rate forecasting meese rogoff redux micro based exchange rate forecasting by martin d d evans and richard k lyons this paper compares the true ex ante fore casting performance of a micro based model against both a standard macro model and a random walk in contrast to existing literature which is focused on longer horizon forecasting we examine forecasting over horizons from one day to one month the one month horizon being where micro and macro analysis begin to over lap over our three year forecasting sample we find that the micro based model consistently outperforms both the random walk and the macro model micro based forecasts account for almost 16 percent of the sample variance in monthly spot rate changes these results pro vide a level of empirical validation as yet unat tained by other models the forecasting experiment proposed by richard meese and kenneth rogoff 1983 re mains a benchmark against which exchange rate models are judged their result that structural macro models cannot outperform a naive random walk has proved robust over the decades yet the meese rogoff paper was never about forecasting in the true sense i e using tirrie f information to forecast exchange rates at t 1 b y using concurrent realized values of the forcing variables their regressions were more about concurrent explanation than about ex ante forecasting their only forecast ing element is in their reliance on ex ante data to estimate equation parameters which appro priately penalized models whose estimated pa rameters were unstable tion for the random walk nature of exchange rates is that there exists some unobserved fun damental that itself follows a random walk un observed being important because fundamentals proposed in most macro models do not follow random walks they offer a different explana tion one rooted in the asset approach to ex change rates and the present value relation that follows from it specifically they show that i f fundamentals are 1 1 but not necessarily ran dom walks then as the discount factor in the present value relation approaches 1 the ex change rate will follow a process arbitrarily close to a random walk intuitively given that an 1 1 process can be split into random walk and stationary components a discount factor near 1 means that most all of the weight is placed on fundamentals far into the future ex pectations of which are dominated by the random walk component charles engel and kenneth west 2004 2005 provide a valuable perspective on the forecastability of exchange rates one explana this paper takes the analysis of engel and west as an important reorientation of thinking and brings it to the natural next step specifi cally if there is little room for forecasting based on stationary components of fundamentals then one needs to focus on where all the action is namely exchange rate dynamics that come from expectational surprises though the sur prise part is by definition orthogonal to public information our micro based model shows that there should exist types of nonpublic infor mation that are useful for forecasting this part and where to look for these types of informa tion we then locate data on these types of nonpublic information and test whether they have true ex ante forecasting power we should evans department of economics georgetown uni versity washington dc 20057 and nber lyons haas school of business university of california berkeley c a 94720 1900 and nber we are grateful to ken west for his comments and to the national science foundation for financial support we refrain from using the word news because it has too strong an association with macro information that is public which even in the most careful of event studies explains less than 5 percent of exchange rate variation in total see torben andersen et al 2003

when do central bank interventions influence intra daily and longer term exchange rate movements this paper examines dollar interventions by the g3 since 1989 and the reasons that trader reactions to these interventions might differ over time and across central banks market microstructure theory provides a framework for understanding the process by which sterilized central bank interventions are observed and interpreted by traders and how this process in turn might influence exchange rates using intra daily and daily exchange rate and intervention data the paper analyzes the influence of interventions on exchange rate volatility finding evidence of both within day and daily impact effects but little evidence that interventions influence longer term volatility

information aggregation in a noisy rational expectations economy abstract this paper analyzes a general equilibrium model of a competitive security market in which traders possess independent pieces of information about the return of a risky asset each trader conditions his estimate of the return both on his own private source of information and price which in equilibrium serves as a noisy aggregator of the total information observed by all traders a closed form characterization of the rational expectations equilibrium is presented a counter example to the existence of fully revealing equilibrium is developed