The foreign exchange market is the largest, fastest-growing financial market in the world. Yet conventional macroeconomic approaches do not explain why people trade foreign exchange. At the same time, they fail to explain the short-run determinants of the exchange rate. These nine innovative essays use a microstructure approach to analyze the workings of the foreign exchange market, with special emphasis on institutional aspects and the actual behavior of market participants. They examine the volume of transactions, heterogeneity of traders, the time of day and location of trading, the bid-ask spread, and the high level of exchange rate volatility that has puzzled many observers. They also consider the structure of the market, including such issues as nontransparency, asymmetric information, liquidity trading, the use of automated brokers, the relationship between spot and derivative markets, and the importance of systemic risk in the market. This timely volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in the economics of international finance.

This book proposes new methods to build optimal portfolios and to analyze market liquidity and volatility under market microstructure effects, as well as new financial risk measures using parametric and non-parametric techniques. In particular, it investigates the market microstructure of foreign exchange and futures markets.

Bid-ask spreads for Asian emerging market currencies increased sharply during the Asian crisis. A key question is whether such wide spreads were excessive or explained by models of bid-ask spreads. Precrisis estimates of standard models show that spreads during the crisis were in most cases tighter than spreads predicted by the models and there are few cases of excessive spreads. The result is largely explained by the substantial increase in exchange rate volatility during the crisis and to some extent by the level change. The empirical models have greater explanatory power for emerging- than for mature-market currencies.

Market makers learn about asset values as they set intraday prices and absorb portfolio flows. Absorbing these flows causes inventory imbalances. Previous work has argued that market makers change prices to manage incoming flows and offset inventory imbalances. This study argues that they have multiple instruments, or ways to manage inventory imbalances and learn about evolving asset values. Hence, they smooth inventory levels and update prior information about assets using multiple instruments. In ignoring other instruments, previous studies have ignored the information that these provide and overemphasize the role of price changes in inventory management. The model presented here provides new estimates of asymmetric information and inventory effects, the price impact of each instrument, the cost of liquidity, and the impact of an intervention on these costs.

Currency Competition and Foreign Exchange Markets by Philipp Hartmann of the European Central Bank is a major theoretical and empirical study of international currencies, which focuses on the role which the Euro will play in the international monetary and financial system along with the US dollar and the Japanese yen. In contrast to much of the existing literature which approaches the subject from a macroeconomic perspective, Philipp Hartmann develops a theoretical model which uses game theory, time series and panel econometrics, and links financial markets analysis with transaction cost economics. The results of Currency Competition and Foreign Exchange Markets are presented with reference to political, historical and institutional considerations, and provide accessible answers to policy-makers, business people and scholars worldwide. The sections on Spread Estimation and Multiple Vehicles with Inter-Dealer Price and Entry Competition will be of particular use for finance professionals.

This paper establishes several intra-day patterns of the high-frequency exchange rate behavior, using the firm bid-ask quote, transaction of the EBS data set. First, the activity of quote and transactions is high in the beginning hours of the three major currency markets -- Tokyo, London, and New York and low during the Tokyo and London lunch hours and late afternoon in New York. Second, a new observation is obtained in that activity does not increase toward the end of business hours in the three major markets, even during the closing hours of New York on Friday. Third, an average bid-ask spread is narrow (wide), when quote and deal frequencies are high (low, respectively), except the beginning hour of Tokyo (GMT 0), when the bid-ask spread is wide despite high levels of activity.

This book demystifies the foreign exchange market by focusing on the people who comprise it. Drawing on the expertise of the very professionals whose decisions help shape the market, Thomas Oberlechner describes the highly interdependent relationship between financial decision makers and news providers, showing that the assumption that the foreign exchange market is purely economic and rational has to be replaced by a more complex market psychology.

In his 1972 Janeway Lectures at Princeton, James Tobin, the 1981 Nobel Prize winner for economics, submitted a proposal for a levy on international currency transactions. The idea was not greeted with enthusiasm, as the 1970s were a period of optimism and confidence in floating exchange rages. Yet, whenever currency crises erupted during the past decades, the proposal for a levy on international currency transactions would once again arise. In the 1990s, two additional facts have sharpened interest in the Tobin tax proposal. First is the growing volume of foreign exchange trading. Second, interest is coming not only from policymakers and experts concerned with the smooth functioning of financial markets. It is shared by those concerned with public financing of development--the fiscal crisis of the state as well as the growing need for international cooperation on problems such as the environment, poverty, peace and security. This work makes a systematic analysis of the proposal for a foreign exchange transactions levy. Its chapters examine the economic desirability of such a levy, its technical and political feasibility, its revenue potential, the possible uses of that revenue, and related administrative and institutional aspects.

This book collects my scholarly research on the behavior of foreign exchange rates conducted over the past twenty-five years. The collection includes papers that study the behavior of exchange rates from the traditional macroeconomic and newer microstructure perspectives. The former perspective considers the linkages between the macro economy and currency prices in an effort to understand the behavior of exchange rates over quarters, years and decades. By contrast, the microstructure perspective considers how the details of currency trading affect how macroeconomic information becomes embedded in currency prices, a process which drives exchange-rates over intraday horizons. The book also contains papers with a hybrid perspective that consider the details of currency trading and macroeconomic linkages in an effort to understand exchange-rate dynamics across all horizons.