SFX Interventions, Financial Intermediation, and External Shocks in Emerging Economies

In this document, we study the role of sterilized foreign exchange (SFX) interventions as an additional monetary policy instrument for emerging market economies in response to external shocks. We develop a model in order to analyze SFX interventions as a balance sheet policy induced by a financial friction in the form of an agency problem between banks and depositors. The severity of the bank’s agency problem depends directly on a measure of currency mismatch at the bank level. Moreover, credit and deposit dollarization coexists in equilibrium as endogenous variables. In this context, SFX interventions can lean against the response of the bank’s lending capacity and ultimately the response of real variables by moderating the response of the exchange rate. Furthermore, we take the model to data by calibrating it to replicate some financial steady-state targets for the Peruvian banking system as well as matching the impulse responses of the macroeconomic model to the impulse responses implied by an SVAR model. Our results indicate that SFX interventions successfully reduce GDP and investment volatility by about 6% and 14%, respectively, when compared to a flexible exchange rate regime. Moreover, SFX interventions reduce the response of GDP to foreign interest rate and commodity price shocks by around 11 and 22 percent, respectively. Hence, this policy produces significant welfare gains when responding to external shocks: if the Central Bank does not intervene in the Forex market in the face of external shocks, there would be a welfare loss of 1.1%.