"Micro Effects of Macro Announcements: Real-Time Price Discovery in Foreign Exchange"

Abstract

Using a new dataset consisting of six years of real-time exchange rate quotations, macroeconomic expectations, and macroeconomic realizations (announcements), we characterize the conditional means of U.S. dollar spot exchange rates versus German Mark, British Pound, Japanese Yen, Swiss Franc, and the Euro. In particular, we find that announcement surprises (that is, divergences between expectations and realizations, or “news”) produce conditional mean jumps; hence high-frequency exchange rate dynamics are linked to fundamentals. The details of the linkage are intriguing and include announcement timing and sign effects. The sign effect refers to the fact that the market reacts to news in an asymmetric fashion: bad news has greater impact than good news, which we relate to recent theoretical work on information processing and price discovery.

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Bollerslev

Tim Bollerslev

Juanita and Clifton Kreps Distinguished Professor of Economics, in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences

Professor Bollerslev conducts research in the areas of time-series econometrics, financial econometrics, and empirical asset pricing finance. He is particularly well known for his developments of econometric models and procedures for analyzing and forecasting financial market volatility. Much of Bollerslev’s recent research has focused on the analysis of newly available high-frequency intraday, or tick-by-tick, financial data and so-called realized volatility measures, macroeconomic news announcement effects, and the pricing of volatility risk. Recent reviews of his work are available in the two Handbook chapters "Volatility and Correlation Forecasting” (with Torben G. Andersen, Peter Christoffersen and Francis X. Diebold), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, (eds. Graham Elliott, Clive W.J. Granger and Allan Timmermann), 2006, and "Parametric and Nonparametric Volatility Measurement” (with Torben G. Andersen and Francis X. Diebold), in Handbook of Financial Econometrics, (eds. Yacine Aït-Sahalia and Lars P. Hansen), 2009.


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