Rasmus Fatum (University of Alberta; University of California, Santa Cruz) Michael Hutchison (University of California Santa Cruz Economics Department)
Additional information is available for the following
registered author(s):
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 rate continuously changing, than standard time-series approaches. Focusing on daily Japanese and US official intervention operations, we identify separate intervention "episodes" and analyze the subsequent effect on the exchange rate. Using the non-parametric sign test and matched-sample test, we find strong evidence that sterilized intervention systemically affects the exchange rate in the short-run (less than one month). This result holds even when intervention is not associated with (simultaneous) interest rate changes, whether or not intervention is "secret" (in the sense of no official reports or rumors of intervention reported over the newswires), and against other robustness checks. Large-scale (amounts over $1 billion) intervention, coordinated with the Bank of Japan and the Federal Reserve working in unison, give the highest success rate. During the period that the Bank of Japan has reduced interbank rates to 0.5 percent and below (from September 1995), however, only one intervention operation has been coordinated with the Fed and the success rate has been correspondingly low.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.