The Effectiveness of Official Foreign Exchange Intervention in a Small Open Economy: The Case of the Canadian Dollar

The Bank of Canada is one of very few central banks that has made records of the intraday timing of its intervention operations available to researchers. The authors investigate the effectiveness of sterilized intervention in the Canadian dollar exchange rate market over the period January 1995 to September 1998. They employ an event study methodology and different criteria for success, and use both daily data and high-frequency (intraday) intervention and exchange rate data. The time period covers two distinct intervention regimes, characterized by mechanistic and discretionary intervention, respectively. Furthermore, the authors address the issue of currency comovements by carrying out the analysis using both the readily observable Canadian dollar/U.S. dollar exchange rate and the Canadian dollar/U.S. dollar exchange rate adjusted for general currency co-movements against the U.S. dollar. When they analyze the high-frequency data, the authors find evidence that intervention systematically affects movements in the Canadian dollar/U.S. dollar exchange rate and in the desired direction, along with some evidence that intervention is associated with a reduction of exchange rate volatility. When investigating exchange rate movements around intervention events using daily data, the authors find some evidence supportive of effectiveness. These effects, however, are weakened when adjusting for currency comovements against the U.S. dollar.Exchange rates; Financial markets

The US stock market leads the Federal funds rate and Treasury bond yields

Using a recently introduced method to quantify the time varying lead-lag dependencies between pairs of economic time series (the thermal optimal path method), we test two fundamental tenets of the theory of fixed income: (i) the stock market variations and the yield changes should be anti-correlated; (ii) the change in central bank rates, as a proxy of the monetary policy of the central bank, should be a predictor of the future stock market direction. Using both monthly and weekly data, we found very similar lead-lag dependence between the S&P500 stock market index and the yields of bonds inside two groups: bond yields of short-term maturities (Federal funds rate (FFR), 3M, 6M, 1Y, 2Y, and 3Y) and bond yields of long-term maturities (5Y, 7Y, 10Y, and 20Y). In all cases, we observe the opposite of (i) and (ii). First, the stock market and yields move in the same direction. Second, the stock market leads the yields, including and especially the FFR. Moreover, we find that the short-term yields in the first group lead the long-term yields in the second group before the financial crisis that started mid-2007 and the inverse relationship holds afterwards. These results suggest that the Federal Reserve is increasingly mindful of the stock market behavior, seen at key to the recovery and health of the economy. Long-term investors seem also to have been more reactive and mindful of the signals provided by the financial stock markets than the Federal Reserve itself after the start of the financial crisis. The lead of the S&P500 stock market index over the bond yields of all maturities is confirmed by the traditional lagged cross-correlation analysis.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl

The Citizen-Candidate Model with Imperfect Policy Control

We present a modified citizen-candidate model where the implemented policy arises from a compromise between the government and an unelected external power. We show that the two-candidate equilibria of this model differ significantly from the original: however small the cost of candidacy, the distance between the candidates´ policies, both ideal and implemented, remains strictly above a threshold. Moreover, there may be one-candidate equilibria in which the only candidate is not the one most preferred by the median voter. Both results point out that, even with negligible cost of entry, there are limits to strategic delegation

Flexible Exchange Rate with Inflation Targeting in Chile: Experience and Issues

The first five years of the flexible exchange rate and inflation targeting regime in Chile have shown positive results. Inflation is under control, the exchange rate has moved with the external conditions, monetary policy has been countercyclical and the cycle has apparently smoothened. Even though exchange rate volatility has increased, as expected with a flexible regime, this has also happened in other countries with similar characteristics. This increased volatility has lower extreme real exchange rate valuations than in the past, as is also seen in other countries with alternative exchange rate regimes. Important progress in derivatives market deepening, as well in a lower pass-through from the exchange rate to inflation, have contributed to increasing the credibility and feasibility of the current policy framework, while minimizing potential costs derived from that framework

Behind Closed Doors: Revealing the ECB’S Decision Rule

This paper aims at discovering the decision rule the Governing Council of the ECB uses to set interest rates. We construct a Taylor rule for each member of the council and for the euro area as a whole, and aggregate the interest rates they produce using several classes of decision-making mechanisms: chairman dominance, bargaining, consensus, voting, and voting with a chairman. We test alternative scenarios in which individual members of the council pursue either a national or a federal objective. We then compare the interest-rate path predicted by each scenario with the observed euro area's interest rate. We find that scenarios in which all members of the Governing Council are assumed to pursue Euro-area-wide objectives are dominated by scenarios in which decisions are made collectively by a council consisting of members pursuing national objectives. The best-performing scenario is the one in which individual members of the Governing Council follow national objectives, bargain over the interest rate, and their weights are based on their country's share of the zone's GDP