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Intervention operations are used by governments to manage their exchange rates but officials rarely confirm their presence in the market, leading inevitably to erroneous reports in the financial press. There are also reports of what we term, unrequited interventions, interventions that the market expects but do not materialize. In this paper we examine the effects of various types of intervention news on intra-day exchange rate behaviour. We find that unrequited interventions have a statistically significant influence on returns, volatility and order flow, suggesting that the expectation of intervention, even when governments do not intervene, can affect currency values.

This paper studies and assesses the impact of G3 Central Bank interventions on the DEM/USD exchange rate properties using daily realized moments of exchange rate returns (obtained from intraday data) for the period 1989-2001. Event studies in terms of the realized moments for the intervention day, the days preceding and following the intervention day illustrate the shape of this impact. Rolling regressions results for an ARFIMA model for realized moments are used to measure the intervention impact and characterize its significance. The analysis confirms previous findings of an increase of volatility of coordinated Central Bank Interventions. It highlight new findings on the timing and the persistence of coordinated interventions on exchange rate volatility, on important volatility spillovers, on the impact on exchange rate covariances and correlations and on skewness coeficients.

We test the effectiveness of the interventions performed by the Czech National Bank in the EUR/CZK within the framework of the Evans-Lyons (JME, 2002) microstructure model of the forex market. Employing time-stamped quotes and transactions on the Reuters Spot Matching market, we estimate a two-equation system on the rate change and order flow at hourly intervals. We find a significant impact of order flow on the exchange rate, equal on average to 7.6 basis points per €10 million in the whole sample period, 80 percent of which persists through the day. The existence of distinct subperiods enables us to estimate the potential effects of intervention in three different states of the market. First, the central bank might perform secret interventions in orderly market conditions, when dealers perceive a low likelihood of their occurrence. Second, secret interventions might take place in a state characterized by a high likelihood of their occurrence. The third state is characterized by the market’s knowledge that intervention is indeed taking place. Our results lend support to the theoretical model and provide useful insight on the conditions for effective central bank intervention in the future. Correspondence:

Zurlinden, of the Swiss National Bank, for making available their database of interventions, and to Olsen & Associates for having provided the tick-by-tick data on the Swiss Franc. I benefited from the encouragements and suggestions of Joel Hasbrouck and Marti Subrahmanyam, and from the comments of Menachem Brenner,

An electronic version of the paper may be downloaded • from the SSRN website: www.SSRN.com • from the RePEc website: www.RePEc.org • from the CESifo website: Twww.CESifo-group.org/wp T

We study the impact of sterilized Central Bank interventions on the microstructure of currency markets. We analyze their major channels of effectiveness, imperfect substitutability and signaling, in a model of sequential trading in which the stylized monetary authority is a rational, but not necessarily profit-maximizing player. In such a setting, and consistent with available empirical evidence, we find that intervention has endogenous long-lived effectsonquoteswhen informative about policy objectives and fundamentals, or when the threat of future actions by the Central Bank is significant and credible, for these circumstances lead uninformed investors or dealers to a permanent revision in their beliefs. Portfolio balance effects of such transactions are instead short-lived, because of trading occurring sequentially and not because of high asset substitutability, as often argued in the literature. We also find that a monetary authority attempting to lean against the wind or to chase the trend of the domestic currency is generally more successful when dealers compete against each other for the incoming trades. Intuitively, competition induces the dealers to pass all revenues or losses they expect from trading with the Central Bank onto the population of investors. This is accomplished by greater, and generally

Using a new approach relying on news wire reports, we estimate the proportion of secret interventions (i.e., unreported official interventions) in the foreign exchange markets that have been conducted by the three major central banks since 1985. We therefore revisit the estimation of conditional probabilities of secret operations and compute them by both central bank and operation type. The proportion of secret interventions is found to be lower for concerted operations and to display a great deal of variability over time as well as across the three major central banks.

Abstract: This paper analyzes official, high-frequency Bank of Canada intervention and exchange rate data (the latter quoted at the end of every 5-minute interval over every 24-hour period) over the January 1995 to September 1998 time-period. The data is of particular interest as it spans over two distinctly different intervention regimes – one characterized by purely rules-based (“mechanistic”) intervention versus one characterized by both rules-based and discretionary intervention. This unique feature of the data allows for both a comparison of the effects of rules-based version discretionary intervention and a general investigation of intraday effects of intervention. Employing an event-study methodology and three different criteria for success, the study presents strong evidence showing that intervention systematically affects movements in the CAD/USD and in the desired direction along with some evidence that intervention is associated with a reduction of exchange rate volatility. Interestingly, there is no indication that discretionary intervention is more effective than rules-based intervention.