Empirical Modeling of Exchange Rate Dynamics (Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems)

This book uses the methods of statistical time-series analysis to characterize the stochastic structure of seven major dollar spot exchange rates, at both weekly and monthly frequencies, during the recent floating-rate regime 1973-1985. While the conditional-mean behaviour of each exchange rate is close to a random walk, the conditional variances are found to have strongly time-varying volatility. Models of autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH) are estimated and used to explain unconditional exchange-rate leptokurtosis (as well as convergence to normality under temporal aggregation), and to provide superior interval predictors. The results are extended to real exchange rates and deviations from purchasing power parity.