The Exchange Rate in a Behavioral Finance Framework / Edition 1 available in Hardcover
The Exchange Rate in a Behavioral Finance Framework / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 069112163X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691121635
- Pub. Date:
- 04/02/2006
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 069112163X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691121635
- Pub. Date:
- 04/02/2006
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
The Exchange Rate in a Behavioral Finance Framework / Edition 1
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Overview
The authors' modeling approach is based on the idea that agents use simple forecasting rules and switch to those rules that have been shown to be the most profitable in the past. This selection mechanism is based on trial and error and is probably the best possible strategy in an uncertain world, the authors contend. It creates a rich dynamic in the foreign exchange markets and can generate bubbles and crashes.
Sensitivity to initial conditions is a pervasive force in De Grauwe and Grimaldi's model. It explains why large exchange-rate changes and volatility clustering occur. It also has important implications for understanding how the news affects the exchange rate. De Grauwe and Grimaldi conclude that news in fundamentals has an unpredictable effect on the exchange rate. Sometimes, they maintain, it alters the exchange rate considerably; at other times it has no effectwhatsoever.
The authors also use their model to analyze the effects of official interventions in the foreign exchange market. They show that simple intervention rules of the "leaning-against-the-wind" variety can be effective in eliminating bubbles and crashes in the exchange rate. They further demonstrate how, quite paradoxically, by intervening in the foreign exchange market the central bank makes the market look more efficient.
Clear and comprehensive, The Exchange Rate in a Behavioral Finance Framework is a must-have for analysts in foreign exchange markets as well as students of international finance and economics.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691121635 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/02/2006 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Exchange Rate in a Behavioral Finance Framework
By Paul De Grauwe Marianna Grimaldi
Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2006 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-691-12163-X
Chapter One
THE NEED FOR A NEW PARADIGM1.1 The Rational Representative Agent Paradigm
Since the start of the rational-expectations revolution in the mid 1970s, macroeconomic analysis has been dominated by the assumption of the rational representative agent. This assumption has now become the main building block of macroeconomic modeling, so much so that macroeconomic models without a microfoundation based on the rationality assumption are simply no longer taken seriously.
The main ingredients of the rational representative agent model are well-known. First, the representative agent is assumed to continuously maximize his utility in an intertemporal framework. Second, the forecasts made by this agent are rational in the sense that they take all available information into account, including the information embedded in the structure of the model. This implies that agents do not make systematic errors in forecasting future variables. The great attractiveness of the rational-expectations model is that it imposes consistency between the agent's forecasts (the subjective probability distribution of future variables) and the forecasts generated by the model (the objective probability). Third, the modelimplies that markets are efficient, i.e., asset prices (including the exchange rate that will be the focus of our analysis in this book) reflect all relevant information about the fundamental variables that determine the value of the asset. The mechanism that ensures efficiency can be described as follows: when rational agents value a particular asset, they compute the fundamental value of that asset and price it accordingly. If they obtain new information, they will immediately incorporate that information in their valuation of the asset. Failure to arbitrage on that new information would imply that they leave profit opportunities unexploited. Rational agents will not do this.
The efficient-market implication of the model is important because it generates a number of predictions that can be tested empirically. The main empirical prediction of the rational representative agent model is that changes in the price of an asset must reflect unexpected changes (news) of the fundamental variables. The corollary of this prediction is that when there is no news about the underlying fundamentals the price cannot change. Thus, only if the fundamentals change unexpectedly should one observe movements in the asset price.
There is no doubt that the rational-expectations-efficient-market (REEM) model is an elegant intellectual construction that continues to exert a strong attraction to many economists enamored by the beauty of its logical consistency.
1.2 Cracks in the REEM Construction
A scientific theory, unlike religious belief or works of art, should not be judged by its elegance but by its capacity to withstand empirical testing. It is now increasingly recognized that the main empirical predictions of the REEM model have not been borne out by the facts.
A major shock to the theory came when spectacular bubbles and crashes occurred both in the stock markets and in the foreign exchange markets. We show two episodes of such bubbles and crashes in the foreign exchange market. Figure 1.1 shows the DM/USD exchange rate during the period 1980-87. We observe that during the first half of the 1980s the dollar experienced a strong upward movement, so that by 1985 it had doubled in value against the German mark. In 1985 the crash came, and in the following two years the dollar halved in value again against the mark. Something similar occurred during the period 1996-2004. Figure 1.2 shows the euro/USD rate during that period. From 1996 to 2001 the dollar increased by more than 70% against the euro (DM). In 2001 it started a spectacular decline, such that by the end of 2004 it was at approximately the same level as it was at the start of the bubble. Thus, it appears that, since the start of flexible exchange rates in 1973, the dollar has been involved in two major bubbles and crashes, each of which has lasted eight to nine years. To put it another way, since 1973 the dollar was caught by a bubble-and-crash dynamics for about half of the time.
Defenders of the REEM model will of course have difficulty in accepting this bubble-and-crash interpretation of the dollar exchange rate movements. They will typically argue that these movements can be explained by a series of fundamental shocks. For example, it can be argued that the upward movement of the dollar during the period 1980-85 was due to a series of positive shocks in U.S. fundamentals, to be followed after 1985 by a series of negative news about U.S. fundamentals for two years. A similar interpretation of the dollar movements could be given during the period 1996-2004. The trouble with this interpretation is that there was simply not enough positive news to account for the long upward movements. Similarly, there was not enough negative news to explain the crashes afterward (see Frankel and Froot 1986, 1990).
The lack of sufficient news in the fundamentals to explain the wide swings of the exchange rates is made very visible in a recent study of Ehrmann and Fratzscher (2005). These authors looked carefully at a whole series of fundamental variables (inflation differentials, current accounts, output growth) in the United States and in the Eurozone and computed an index of news in these fundamentals. We show the result of their calculation in Figure 1.3, together with the USD/euro rate during the period 1993-2003. It is striking to find that there is very little movement in the news variable, while the exchange rate is moving wildly around this news variable. In addition, quite often the exchange rate moves in the opposite direction to that expected if it were driven by fundamental news. For example, it can be seen from Figure 1.3 that during the period 1999-2001 the news about the euro was relatively more favorable than the news about the dollar (see De Grauwe (2000) for additional evidence), and yet the euro declined spectacularly against the dollar.
This lack of correlation between news in the fundamentals and the exchange rate movements has been documented in many other studies. For example, using high-frequency data, Goodhart (1989) and Goodhart and Figliuoli (1991) found that most of the time the exchange rate moves when there is no observable news in the fundamental economic variables. This result was also confirmed by Faust et al. (2002). Thus, the empirical evidence that we now have is that the exchange rate movements are very much disconnected from movements in the fundamentals. This finding for the foreign exchange market is consistent with similar findings in the stock markets (see Cutler et al. 1988; Shiller 1989; Shleifer 2000). It has led Obstfeld and Rogoff to identify this "disconnect puzzle" as the major unexplained empirical regularity about the exchange rates (Obstfeld and Rogoff 1996).
One possible rationalization of the large cyclical movements of the exchange rate around its fundamental could be found in the celebrated Dornbusch (1976) model. This model, which continues to be very popular in the classroom, incorporates the efficient-market hypothesis but adds some rigidities in the prices of goods. As a result, it produces the overshooting phenomenon, i.e., the exchange rate overreacts to news in the fundamentals (it overshoots) and then moves back over time to its fundamental value. The Dornbusch model has sometimes been seen as the model that rescues the efficient-market model because it shows that temporary movements away from the fundamental need not imply that markets are inefficient. The trouble with this rescue operation is that the dynamics of the Dornbusch model does not conform with the dynamics observed in the foreign exchange market. The Dornbusch model predicts that news in the fundamentals leads to an instantaneous jump in the exchange rate and a slow movement back to the fundamental afterwards. But this is not what we observe in reality. When the exchange rate is involved in a bubble and crash, it appears that the bubble phase is quite long, while the crash is typically shorter. This is exactly the opposite of the dynamics in the Dornbusch model. In addition, in order for the Dornbusch model to explain the bubbles of 1980-85 and of 1996-2001 one would need a long series of positive news in the dollar fundamentals, each of which leads to positive jumps in the exchange rate. As we showed above, there were simply not enough positive shocks in the fundamentals to do the trick. On one occasion, i.e., during the period 1999-2001, the exchange rate movements were even going in a direction opposite to the news.
Other empirical anomalies have been discovered that invalidate the REEM model. We will discuss these anomalies in greater detail in this book. Here we mention the phenomenon of volatility clustering, i.e., it has been found that the volatility of the exchange rate is autocorrelated. This means that there are tranquil and turbulent periods. These periods of tranquillity and turbulence alternate in an unpredictable fashion. We show some descriptive evidence of this in Figure 1.4, which presents the daily changes (the returns) in the DM/USD rate during the period 1986-95. It can clearly be seen that periods of small and large changes in the exchange rate tend to cluster. If one adheres to the REEM model, the only way one can explain this volatility clustering is to assume that the volatility in the news about fundamental variables is clustered, so that the volatility clustering in the exchange rate just reflects volatility clustering in the news. Explaining volatility clustering in the exchange rate by volatility clustering in the news, however, is a "Deus ex machina" explanation that shifts the need to explain these phenomena to a higher level. In other words, the REEM model has no explanation for the widespread empirical observation that the volatility of asset prices, including the exchange rate, tends to be clustered.
Figure 1.4 reveals another empirical phenomenon observed in the exchange rate data. This is that the returns are not normally distributed. We can see from Figure 1.4 that there were quite often daily changes in the DM/USD rate that are several times the standard deviation during the sample period (1986-95). We observe that at three occasions the daily change was 0.015 or more, which is five times the standard deviation of 0.0029. Such a large change has a chance of occurring only once every 7000 years, if the returns are normally distributed. The fact that we find three such large changes during a sample period of ten years rules out the possibility that these returns are normally distributed. In order to show the contrast with normally distributed returns, we present a series of artificially generated returns that are normally distributed in Figure 1.5. The contrast between these normally distributed returns and observed exchange rate returns is striking.
The evidence that the exchange rate returns are not normally distributed leads to a similar problem for the REEM model. In order to explain the nonnormality of exchange rate changes, the news in the fundamentals must be nonnormally distributed. As in the previous case, this interpretation shifts the need to explain the phenomenon to another level. In other words, the REEM model has no explanation for the widely observed fact that returns are not normally distributed, and has to rely on a "Deus ex machina" explanation.
The reaction of economists to the accumulating evidence against the REEM model has gone in two directions. One reaction has been to invoke technical reasons why the empirical evidence is unfavorable for the REEM model. For example, tests of the existence of bubbles and crashes and of a disconnect puzzle have often been dismissed by arguing that these tests are based on a misspecification of the underlying model of the fundamental variables. This criticism, however, has become less and less credible, as researchers have specified many different models producing similar results, i.e., that asset prices and exchange rates in particular are only loosely related to underlying fundamentals. Quite paradoxically, the increasing empirical evidence against the REEM model has led to retrenchment into a more rigorous microfoundation of macroeconomic models (see Obstfeld and Rogoff (1996), who have done this very systematically in open-economy macroeconomics). This retrenchment into theoretical analysis has as yet led to few empirical propositions that can be refuted by the data.
The second reaction to the empirical failure of the REEM model has been to look for alternative modeling approaches. This reaction has been greatly stimulated by the emergence of a new branch of economic thinking introduced first by Simon (1957) and later by Kahneman and Tversky, Thaler, Shleifer, and others. In the next section we summarize the main ideas behind this school of thought that is sometimes called "behavioral economics" and, when applied to financial markets, "behavioral finance."
1.3 Behavioral Finance: A Quick Survey
The starting point of this school of thought is the large body of evidence that has accumulated over time indicating that individuals do not behave in the way described by the rational agent paradigm. Many anomalies have been found by different researchers. Pathbreaking research was done by Kahneman and Tversky. (For a nice survey of this research the reader is referred to the Nobel lecture of Kahneman (2002).) We mention just a few of these anomalies here. The first one is called "framing" (Tversky and Kahneman 1981). One of the major tenets of the rational agent model is that the individual's preferences are not affected by the particular way a choice is presented. However, it appears that agents' preferences are very much influenced by the way a choice is "framed." A famous example of such a framing effect is the Asian disease problem, which shows how the way a choice is formulated leads agents to choose differently. In an appendix (see Section 1.5) we discuss this Asian disease framing effect in greater detail.
A second anomaly has also been researched thoroughly by Kahneman and Tversky. This anomaly challenges the expected utility theory that is at the center of the REEM model. This theory was first formulated by the great mathematician Bernoulli in 1738. It assumes that rational agents who maximize the utility of their wealth only take into account the utility of their final asset position. Their initial wealth position does not affect the value they attach to that final asset position. Kahneman and Tversky found that this assumption is rejected by agents' behavior. This was found in both experimental and observational studies (Kahneman and Tversky 2000). It appears from these studies that agents' evaluation of their final asset position does depend on the initial wealth. This finding led Kahneman and Tversky to propose another theory of choice under uncertainty. In this theory, called prospect theory, the carriers of utility are gains and losses (changes in wealth rather than states of wealth). One of the important insights of this theory is that agents attach a different utility value to gains and losses (Kahneman and Tversky 1973). We will use and further expand this theory in Chapter 5.
Other anomalies that challenge the rational agent model were discovered (see Thaler (1994) for spirited discussions of many anomalies). We just mention "anchoring" effects here, whereby agents who do not fully understand the world in which they live are highly selective in the way they use information and concentrate on the information they understand or the information that is fresh in their minds. This anchoring effect explains why agents often extrapolate recent movements in prices.
These empirical anomalies lead to the conclusion that agents do not conform to the rational agent model. But let us pause here for a while. The view that many agents do not behave rationally (in the sense in which rationality is defined in the REEM model) does not necessarily invalidate that model. Proponents of the REEM model have countered that, for markets to be efficient, it is sufficient that some agents are rational. To see this, suppose that agents are driven by anchoring effects and are using extrapolative forecasting rules. This will drive the exchange rate away from its fundamental value. The rational agents will recognize that there are profit opportunities to exploit. They will therefore be willing to arbitrage, i.e., to sell the currency when it is overpriced, and to buy it when it is underpriced. This arbitrage activity by the rational agents then ensures that the exchange rate always reflects its fundamental value. Thus, even if the world is populated by a lot of irrational agents, it will be sufficient to have a few rational agents for the markets to conform to the REEM predictions. The market outcome will make it appear as if all agents are rational, while only a few actually are. This has led to the idea that the rational agent assumption is an "as-if" proposition.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Preface ix
Chapter 1: The Need for a New Paradigm 1
1.1 The Rational Representative Agent Paradigm 1
1.2 Cracks in the REEM Construction 2
1.3 Behavioral Finance: A Quick Survey 8
1.4 The Broad Outlines of an Alternative Approach 10
1.5 Appendix: The Asian Disease Problem 12
Chapter 2: A Simple Behavioral Finance Model of the Exchange Rate 13
2.1 Introduction 13
2.2 The Model 14
2.3 Stochastic Simulation of the Model 19
2.4 The Steady State of the Model 25
2.5 Numerical Analysis of the Deterministic Model 27
2.6 Sensitivity Analysis of the Deterministic Model 30
2.7 Basins of Attraction 32
2.8 The Stochastic Model: Sensitivity to Initial Conditions 34
2.9 Why "Crashes" Occur 35
2.10 The Role of Memory 39
2.11 Is Chartism Evolutionarily Stable? 43
2.12 Conclusion 45
2.13 Appendix: Numerical Values of the Parameters Used in the Base Simulation 47
2.14 Appendix: Simulations of the Base Model with Different Stochastic
Realizations 48
Chapter 3: A Slightly More Complex Behavioral Finance Model 49
3.1 Introduction 49
3.2 The Model 49
3.3 Stochastic Simulation of the Model 54
3.4 Solution of the Deterministic Model 54
3.5 Informational Issues 60
3.6 Some Preliminary Remarks on Empirical Predictions of the Model 63
3.7 Rational and Behavioral Bubbles 64
3.8 Conclusion 67
3.9 Appendix: The Variance Ratio σ2f,t / σ2c,t in the Steady State 68
3.10 Appendix: Numerical Values of the Parameters Used in the Base Simulation 69
Chapter 4: Limits to Arbitrage 71
4.1 Introduction 71
4.2 Risk Aversion and Limits to Arbitrage 71
4.3 Transaction Costs and Limits to Arbitrage 75
4.4 Conclusion 86
Chapter 5: Changes in the Perception of Risk 87
5.1 Introduction 87
5.2 Risk Perception and Misalignment 87
5.3 Risk Perception and Losses: Prospect Theory 90
5.4 Changing Risk Perception and Transaction Costs 95
5.5 Conclusion 100
Chapter 6: Modeling the Supply of Foreign Assets and the Current Account 103
6.1 Introduction 103
6.2 Stochastic Simulations of the Model 104
6.3 Deterministic Analysis of the Model 105
6.4 Sensitivity to Initial Conditions and Informational Issues 109
6.5 Profitability of Chartist and Fundamentalist Rules 111
6.6 Conclusion 111
6.7 Appendix: The Steady State of the Model 113
6.8 Appendix: Transitional Dynamics 114
Chapter 7: Risk Appetite in an Evolutionary Perspective 117
7.1 Introduction 117
7.2 The Extended Model 117
7.3 The Nature of Risk Appetite 121
7.4 Sensitivity to Initial Conditions 121
7.5 Sensitivity Analysis 122
7.6 The Effect of News 123
7.7 Conclusion 127
Chapter 8: The Empirical Evidence 129
8.1 Introduction 129
8.2 The Distribution of Returns: A Tale of Fat Tails and Excess Kurtosis 129
8.3 Dependence Properties of Returns 133
8.4 The Disconnect Puzzle 139
8.5 Transaction Costs: Do They Matter? 141
8.6 Asymmetry of Bubbles and Crashes 144
8.7 Is Chartism Evolutionarily Stable? 145
8.8 Conclusion 147
8.9 Appendix: Hill Index and Kurtosis in Prospect Model 149
8.10 Appendix: Some More Results on Volatility Clustering 150
8.11 Appendix: Additional Results for the EC Model 151
Chapter 9: Official Interventions in the Foreign Exchange Markets 153
9.1 Introduction 153
9.2 Modeling Official Interventions in the Foreign Exchange Market 154
9.3 Rule-Based Interventions in the Foreign Exchange Market 159
9.4 Target Intervention 162
9.5 Is Intervention Sustainable? 163
9.6 Conclusion 164
Chapter 10: Chaos in the Foreign Exchange Markets 167
10.1 Introduction 167
10.2 What Is Chaos? 167
10.3 Conditions for Chaos to Occur 169
10.4 Foreign Exchange Market Intervention and Chaos 175
10.5 Target Intervention 177
10.6 Empirical Relevance of Chaotic Dynamics 178
10.7 Conclusion 180
10.8 Appendix: Sensitivity to Parameter Values 181
10.9 Appendix: Intermittency Phenomenon 182
10.10 Appendix: Target Intervention with Small Target Band 183
Chapter 11: Conclusion 185
References 191
Index 197
What People are Saying About This
Extremely well written, sound, and rigorous. There is no other book of this kind.
— Lucio Sarno, University of Warwick
"Extremely well written, sound, and rigorous. There is no other book of this kind."—Lucio Sarno, University of Warwick