The Risk Premium in Forward Foreign Exchange Markets and G-3 Central Bank Intervention: Evidence of Daily Effects, 1985-1990

Evidence that forward rates for foreign exchange are not unbiased forecasts of future spot rates suggests a time-varying risk premium. However,there is little evidence that the forecast error is related to fundamentals, although most investigations have lacked high-frequency data. In this paper, we use daily exchange-rate and official Federal Reserve intervention data to test for an impact of intervention on the forecast error. This paper extends recent analyses of daily changes in exchange rates by Baillie and Bollersev (1989) and Hsieh (1989) to the daily forward-rate forecast errors for the dm/US$ and yen/US$ rates. We estimate an MA(21) process and utilize GARCH with a conditional student-t distribution. We find that 1) U.S. purchases of dollars on day t-1 affect the day t forecast error (f,-E,[~,+~l), 2) there are day-of-the-week effects in the conditional variance, and 3) for the yen/US$ rate, there is GARCH-in-mean. These findings provide some support for considering intervention as a channel through which fundamentals influence risk premia.