This paper applies an established bid-ask spread decomposition model to spot foreign exchange market in order to assess the impact of European Monetary Union (EMU). Additionally, the paper presents and tests a modified decomposition model which is specifically adapted to the features of order-driven markets. The latter model provides much improved performance. Price clustering is introduced as ...

By disaggregating price indices, it becomes apparent that the real exchange rate consists of the real exchange rate for a single good and a weighted sum of relative prices between goods. When applying a battery of panel unit root tests to this sum and its components, it is found that both the sum and the relative prices are non-stationary. This implies that PPP is invalid even if the LOP holds ...

This paper analyzes the behaviour and motivation of fund managers in foreign exchange markets reflected in questionnaire evidence. We find that fund managers and FX dealers differ significantly. Fund managers rely more on fundamentals, basically due to their longer forecasting horizons, and reject non-fundamental influences on exchange rates more than FX dealers. However, neither can fund manag...

Revealed comparative advantage indices are calculated for China (1980-2000 period) and the Chinese provinces (1990-1998 period) and then incorporated into a reduced form export equation. The results of China’s export patterns show that China has moved from a heavy industry-oriented development strategy to a comparative advantage one, with, however, marked differences among provinces. The econom...

Foreign exchange transactions are subject to a unique type of settlement risk. This risk ultimately stems from the difficulty of coordinating separate settlements in two different currencies. Settlement of foreign exchange transactions through the proposed CLS (“Continuous Linked Settlement”) Bank has been discussed as a potential solution to this problem. This paper describes the CLS proposal ...

This article investigates the forward market efficiency by testing the unbiased forward exchange rate hypothesis using nine currencies vis-à-vis the U.S. dollar. The empirical tests are conducted using monthly data during the period between January 1985 and December 1996 and two different methods of cointegration tests, a fractional (GPH) test and the HarrisInder test. The two cointegration tes...

This study examines profits and speculation in the USD/EUR trading of a bank in Germany over a four-month period. Dealing activity at the bank generates profits but speculation does not seem to contribute to this. We find that speculative positions fail to become profitable within a 30-minutes' horizon. Also, the suggestion that exchange rate volatility would foster speculative profits cannot b...

This paper studies the forward premium puzzle in an environment where private agents do not perfectly observe the shocks that drive monetary policy. Private agents optimally update their conditional expectations by means of the Kalman filter. The transition dynamics associated with Kalman filtering lead to fixed time-effects and conditional heteroskedasticity in the forward premium regression. ...

In this paper I discuss in what way, if any, the collapse of Argentina’s experience with a currency board has affected the policy debate on the appropriate exchange rate regime in emerging and transition countries. More specifically, I deal with three issues: (1) I discuss some important aspects of the Argentine experience; (2) I provide a comparative evaluation of economic performance under st...

A large literature in exchange rate economics has investigated the forecasting performance of empirical exchange rate models using conventional point forecast accuracy criteria. However, in the context of managing exchange rate risk, interest centers on more than just point forecasts. This paper provides a formal evaluation of recent exchange rate models based on the term structure of forward e...