IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bpj/sndecm/v17y2013i3p265-279n7.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The forward rate premium puzzle: a case of misspecification?1)

Author

Listed:
  • Hall Stephen G.

    (Economics Dept, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK)

  • Kenjegaliev Amangeldi

    (Dept of Economics, Strathclyde University, Glasgow, G1 1XQ, UK)

  • Swamy P. A. V. B.

    (Federal Reserve Board (retired): c/o, Bank of Greece, 21 E. Venizelos Avenue, GR 102 50 Athens)

  • Tavlas George S.

    (Bank of Greece, 21 E. Venizelos Avenue, GR 102 50 Athens)

Abstract

Empirical studies often report a negative relationship between the difference in the spot exchange rate and the forward premium, violating the forward-rate unbiasedness hypothesis. Using standard regression on a sample of ten exchange rates, we obtain both positive and negative coefficients. We argue that the negative coefficients could arise as a result of the non-linearities in the relationship and misspecification. As an alternative to the standard regression, we use a time-varying-coefficient technique that estimates bias-free coefficients and, thus, should provide better estimates of the link between spot and forward rates. Our findings strongly support the forward rate unbiasedness hypothesis. All the parameters are very close to unity and significant.

Suggested Citation

  • Hall Stephen G. & Kenjegaliev Amangeldi & Swamy P. A. V. B. & Tavlas George S., 2013. "The forward rate premium puzzle: a case of misspecification?1)," Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics & Econometrics, De Gruyter, vol. 17(3), pages 265-279, May.
  • Handle: RePEc:bpj:sndecm:v:17:y:2013:i:3:p:265-279:n:7
    DOI: 10.1515/snde-2013-0009
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1515/snde-2013-0009
    Download Restriction: For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1515/snde-2013-0009?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Lucio Sarno & Giorgio Valente & Hyginus Leon, 2006. "Nonlinearity in Deviations from Uncovered Interest Parity: An Explanation of the Forward Bias Puzzle," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 10(3), pages 443-482, September.
    2. Frankel, Jeffrey & Poonawala, Jumana, 2010. "The forward market in emerging currencies: Less biased than in major currencies," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 29(3), pages 585-598, April.
    3. Hodrick, Robert J. & Srivastava, Sanjay, 1986. "The covariation of risk premiums and expected future spot exchange rates," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 5(1, Supple), pages 5-21, March.
    4. Engel, Charles, 1996. "The forward discount anomaly and the risk premium: A survey of recent evidence," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 3(2), pages 123-192, June.
    5. Avik Chakraborty, 2007. "Learning, Forward Premium Puzzle and Exchange Rate Fundamentals under Sticky Prices," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 6(34), pages 1-13.
    6. Swamy P. A. V. B. & Tavlas George S & Hall Stephen G. F. & Hondroyiannis George, 2010. "Estimation of Parameters in the Presence of Model Misspecification and Measurement Error," Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics & Econometrics, De Gruyter, vol. 14(3), pages 1-35, May.
    7. Granger Clive W.J., 2008. "Non-Linear Models: Where Do We Go Next - Time Varying Parameter Models?," Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics & Econometrics, De Gruyter, vol. 12(3), pages 1-11, September.
    8. Kenneth A. Froot & Jeffrey A. Frankel, 1989. "Forward Discount Bias: Is it an Exchange Risk Premium?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 104(1), pages 139-161.
    9. Stephen Hall & P. Swamy & George Tavlas, 2012. "Generalized cointegration: a new concept with an application to health expenditure and health outcomes," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 42(2), pages 603-618, April.
    10. Baillie, Richard T. & Kilic, Rehim, 2006. "Do asymmetric and nonlinear adjustments explain the forward premium anomaly?," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 22-47, February.
    11. Stephen Hall & P.A.V.B. Swamy & George S. Tavlas, 2009. "The Nonexistence of Instrumental Variables," Discussion Papers in Economics 09/16, Division of Economics, School of Business, University of Leicester.
    12. Baillie, Richard T. & Bollerslev, Tim, 2000. "The forward premium anomaly is not as bad as you think," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 471-488, August.
    13. Sakoulis, Georgios & Zivot, Eric & Choi, Kyongwook, 2010. "Structural change in the forward discount: Implications for the forward rate unbiasedness hypothesis," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 17(5), pages 957-966, December.
    14. Hausman, Jerry A, 1975. "An Instrumental Variable Approach to Full Information Estimators for Linear and Certain Nonlinear Econometric Models," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 43(4), pages 727-738, July.
    15. Granger, C. W. J. & Newbold, P., 1974. "Spurious regressions in econometrics," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 2(2), pages 111-120, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hall, Stephen G. & Hondroyiannis, George & Kenjegaliev, Amangeldi & Swamy, P.A.V.B. & Tavlas, George S., 2013. "Is the relationship between prices and exchange rates homogeneous?," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(C), pages 411-438.
    2. Zigraiova, Diana & Havranek, Tomas & Irsova, Zuzana & Novak, Jiri, 2021. "How puzzling is the forward premium puzzle? A meta-analysis," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 134(C).
    3. Stephen G. Hall & Heather D. Gibson & G. S. Tavlas & Mike G. Tsionas, 2020. "A Monte Carlo Study of Time Varying Coefficient (TVC) Estimation," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 56(1), pages 115-130, June.
    4. Amit K. Sinha & Philip A. Horvath & Robert C. Scott, 2017. "The real miss-specification in the forward rate premium puzzle," Journal of Economics and Finance, Springer;Academy of Economics and Finance, vol. 41(3), pages 463-473, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Amit K. Sinha & Philip A. Horvath & Robert C. Scott, 2017. "The real miss-specification in the forward rate premium puzzle," Journal of Economics and Finance, Springer;Academy of Economics and Finance, vol. 41(3), pages 463-473, July.
    2. Shehadeh, Ali & Li, Youwei & Moore, Michael, 2016. "The Forward Premium Bias, Carry Trade Return and the Risks of Volatility and Liquidity," MPRA Paper 71709, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Kumar, Satish & Trück, Stefan, 2014. "Unbiasedness and risk premiums in the Indian currency futures market," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 29(C), pages 13-32.
    4. Norman C. Miller, 2014. "Exchange Rate Economics," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 14981.
    5. Shehadeh, Ali A. & Li, Youwei & Vigne, Samuel A. & Almaharmeh, Mohammad I. & Wang, Yizhi, 2021. "The existence and severity of the forward premium puzzle during tranquil and turbulent periods: Developed versus developing country currencies," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).
    6. Baillie, Richard T. & Cho, Dooyeon, 2014. "Time variation in the standard forward premium regression: Some new models and tests," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 29(C), pages 52-63.
    7. Miah, Fazlul & Altiti, Omar, 2020. "Risk premium or irrational expectations? An investigation into the causes of forward discount bias across 27 developed and developing economies forward rates," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 51(C).
    8. Michael Jetter & Alex Nikolsko-Rzhevskyy & Olena Ogrokhina, 2019. "Can policy shifts explain the forward discount puzzle?," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 57(6), pages 1891-1909, December.
    9. Jorge Andrés Muñoz Mendoza & Carmen Lissette Veloso Ramos & Sandra María Sepúlveda Yelpo & Carlos Leandro Delgado Fuentealba & Edinson Edgardo Cornejo Saavedra, 2022. "Exchange Markets and Stock Markets Integration in Latin-America," Remef - Revista Mexicana de Economía y Finanzas Nueva Época REMEF (The Mexican Journal of Economics and Finance), Instituto Mexicano de Ejecutivos de Finanzas, IMEF, vol. 17(3), pages 1-24, Julio - S.
    10. Craighead, William D. & Davis, George K. & Miller, Norman C., 2010. "Interest differentials and extreme support for uncovered interest rate parity," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 723-732, October.
    11. C. Emre Alper & Oya Pinar Ardic & Salih Fendoglu, 2009. "The Economics Of The Uncovered Interest Parity Condition For Emerging Markets," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 23(1), pages 115-138, February.
    12. Derek Bond & Michael Harrison & Niall Hession & Edward O'Brien, 2010. "Nonlinearity as an explanation of the forward exchange rate anomaly," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(13), pages 1237-1239.
    13. Matthieu Bussière & Menzie Chinn & Laurent Ferrara & Jonas Heipertz, 2022. "The New Fama Puzzle," IMF Economic Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Monetary Fund, vol. 70(3), pages 451-486, September.
    14. Simpson, Marc W. & Grossmann, Axel, 2014. "An examination of the forward prediction error of U.S. dollar exchange rates and how they are related to bid-ask spreads, purchasing power parity disequilibria, and forward premium asymmetry," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 28(C), pages 221-238.
    15. Hall, Stephen G. & Kenjegaliev, Amangeldi & Swamy, P.A.V.B. & Tavlas, George S., 2013. "Measuring currency pressures: The cases of the Japanese yen, the Chinese yuan, and the UK pound," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 29(C), pages 1-20.
    16. Muhammad Omer & Jakob de Haan & Bert Scholtens, 2019. "Does Uncovered Interest Rate Parity Hold After All?," Lahore Journal of Economics, Department of Economics, The Lahore School of Economics, vol. 24(2), pages 49-72, July-Dec.
    17. Rehim Kılıç, 2023. "Uncovered interest rate, overshooting, and predictability reversal puzzles in an emerging economy," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2023-074, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    18. Olesia Kozlova, 2013. "Forward-Rate Bias, Imperfect Knowledge, and Risk: Evidence from Developed and Developing Countries," 2013 Papers pko627, Job Market Papers.
    19. Lothian, James R., 2016. "Uncovered interest parity: The long and the short of it," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 36(C), pages 1-7.
    20. Kumar, Satish, 2019. "Does risk premium help uncover the uncovered interest parity failure?," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 63(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    forward premium anomaly; time-varying-coefficient; spurious relationship; JEL classifications: C51; E43;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C51 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Model Construction and Estimation
    • E43 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bpj:sndecm:v:17:y:2013:i:3:p:265-279:n:7. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Peter Golla (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.degruyter.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.