How fixed are global exchange rates?

Roger Vicquéry and Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke

While the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1973 has traditionally been seen as heralding a major shift towards floating exchange rates, the extent of this transition away from fixed arrangements has been called into question by a ‘New Consensus’ view. We provide a new index to measure exchange rate fixity at the global level, which restores the conventional account of international monetary history over the last 70 years: according to our measurement global exchange rate fixity is now only about a third of its Bretton Woods level. We highlight how this transition to floating arrangements was largely driven by anchor currencies ceasing to be pegged to one another.

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The granular origins of exchange-rate fluctuations

Simon Lloyd, Daniel Ostry and Balduin Bippus

How much capital flows move exchange rates is a central question in international macroeconomics. A major challenge to addressing it has been the difficulty identifying exogenous cross-border flows, since flows and exchange rates can evolve simultaneously with factors like risk sentiment. In this post, we summarise a staff working paper that resolves this impasse using bank-level data capturing the external positions of UK-based global intermediaries to construct novel ‘Granular Instrumental Variables‘ (GIVs). Using these GIVs, we find that banks’ United States dollar (USD) demand is inelastic – a 1% increase in net-dollar assets appreciates the dollar by 2% against sterling – state dependent – effects double when banks’ capital ratios are one standard deviation below average – and that banks are a ‘marginal investor’ in the dollar-sterling market.

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Uncovering uncovered interest parity: exchange rates, yield curves and business cycles

Simon Lloyd and Emile Marin

The textbook uncovered interest parity (UIP) condition states that the expected change in the exchange rate between two countries over time should be equal to the interest rate differential at that horizon. While UIP appears to hold at longer horizons (around 5-10 years), it is regularly rejected at shorter ones (0-4 years). In a recent paper, we argue that interest rates at other maturities — captured in the slope of the yield curve — reflect information about the pricing of ‘business cycle risks’, which can help explain departures from UIP. A country with a relatively steep yield curve slope will tend to experience a depreciation in excess of the UIP benchmark, at business cycle frequencies especially.

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