On the long-term effectiveness of exchange rate communication and interventions

Exchange rate communication has come to play an increasingly important role as a policy tool for monetary authorities over the past decade. The paper assesses the strategies and the long-term effectiveness of communication as well as actual interventions. The empirical results for the G3 economies indicate that communication has not only exhibited a significant contemporaneous effect on exchange rates, but also has moved forward exchange rates up to a horizon of 6 months in the desired direction. Moreover, communication is found to reduce exchange rate volatility and uncertainty whereas actual interventions tend to raise it. Overall this underlines a key difference between these two policy tools and suggests that communication tends to be a fairly effective policy tool over the medium-term. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.